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BRITISH NOVELISTS 



THEIR STYLES: 

BEING 

A CRITICAL SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF BRITISH 
PROSE FICTION. 



B Y 

DAVID MASSON, M. A., 

PBOFESSOROP EKGLISH LITEGATURE, UNIVERSITY COLLEOK, LOIVDON. 
AUTHOR OF - THE LIFE AKD TIMES OF JOHN MILTON," ETC. 



BOSTON: 
GOULi) AND LINCOLN 

59 WASHINGTON STREET, 

NEW YORK: SHELDON AND COMPANY. 

CINCINNATI: GEORGE S. BLANCHARD. 

18 5 9. 






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GEO. C. KA 



IJD & AVE! 



PREFATORY NOTE. 



The substance of the following pages was 
delivered, in the form of Lectures, to the mem- 
bers of the Philosophical Institution of Edin- 
burgh, in the months of March and April, 1858. 
Passages necessarily omitted in the delivery, are 
here restored; a few passages spoken from 
notes, are here expanded from recollection ; and 
there are also some additions, especially towards 
the end. By these changes the Discourses are 
made to exceed by much the ordinary limits of 
Lectures. I have, however, retained tlie name 

of " Lectures " by way of title, — partly because 
1* 



VI 



PREFATORY yOTE. 



nearly all the matter, as it stands, was actually 
prepared to be spoken ; and partly becaiise the 
name may serve to account for anything in the 
manner of treatment, or in the style, that might 
not be considered so fitting in other forms of 
composition. With respect^to one of the Lec- 
tures -the third- it might even be obliging 
if the reader were to remember specially that it 
was prepared for an Edinburgh audience. 



TJsivEKSiTT College, Losdom, 
June, 1839. 



CONTENTS 



LECTURE I. 

ON THE NOVEL AS A FORM OF LITERATURE, AND ON 
EARLY BRITISH TROSE FICTION. 

(1.) NATURE OK THE NOVEL. — THE NOVEL A FORM OP PO- 
ETRY — ITS RELATION TO THE EPIC — RELATn^B CAPABILITIES 
OF VERSE AND PROSE IN FICTION — POINTS FOR CRITICISM IN A 
NOVEL — THE THEME, OR SUBJECT — THE INCIDENTS — THE SCE- 
NERY—THE CHARACTERS — EXTRA-POETICAL MERITS. (2.) HIS- 
TORY OF THE NOVEL. — ITS LATE APPEARANCE, COMPARED 
WITH OTHER FORMS OF LITERATURE — CLASSICAL ROMANCES — 
MEDIEVAL FICTIONS — EARLY ITALIAN, FRENCH, AND SPANISH 
PROSE FICTIONS — EARLY BRITISH ROMANCES — THE " MORT 
D'ARTHUR "— CHAP-BOOK ROMANCES — EARLY ENGLISH TRANS- 
LATION OF FOREIGN NOVELS — MOKE'S " UTOPIA," AND SIMILAR 
FICTIONS — SIDNEY'S " ARCADIA," AND PASTORAL NOVELS — 
BOYLE'S "PARTHENISSA," AND CLASSIC-HEROIC NOVELS — BUN- 
YAN'S PILGRIM'S PROGRESS — MRS. APHRA BEHN, AND NOVEL- 
ETTES OF THE RESTORATION, 11 



Yin CONTENTS. 

LECTURE II. 

BRITISH NOVELISTS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

SWIFT AKD DEFOE - IL^TELLECTUAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE 
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY - PREPONDERANCE OF PROSE IN BRITISH 
LITERATURE DURING THIS CENTURY -THE FICTIONS OP SWIFT 
AND DEFOE NEW PROSE FORMS - SWIFT^S CHARACTERISTICS - 
DEFOE'S CHARACTERISTICS -RICHAR^ON, FIELDING, SMOLLETT, 
AND*STERNE: THEIR BIOGRAPHICAL RELATIONS SKETCHED - 
RICHARDSON'S METHOD IN HIS NOVELS -HIS MORALITY - HU- 
MOR AND HUMORISTS -FIELDING'S THEORY OF THE NOVEL 
WHICH HE PRACTISED -THE COMIC NOVEL - FIELDING AND 
SMOLLETT COMPARED AND CONTRASTED - BRITISH LIFE A CEN- 
TURY AGO, AS REPRESENTED IN THEIR NOVELS- STERNE'S PE- 
CULIARITIES, MORAL AND LITERARY -JOHNSON'S « RASSELAS," 
GOLDSMITH'S " VICAR OF WAKEFIELD," AND WALPOLE'S "CAS- 
TLE OF OTRANTO"- LATER NOVELS AND NOVELISTS OF THE 

87 

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, 



LECTURE III. 

SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. 

EDINBURGH SEVENTY YEARS AGO- EDINBURGH SINCE - ITS IM- 
PORTANT INHABITANTS IN RECENT TIMES -SCOTT PREEMINENTLY 
THE "GENIUS LOCI "- TWO MOST PROMINENT FEATURES OP 
SCOTT'S MIND -HIS LOVE OF THE PAST, OR PASSION FOR HIS- 



CONTENTS. IX 

TORY — HIS AFFECTION FOR THE PAST, KOT FOR THE WHOLE 
PAST, BUT ONLY FOR THE GOTHIC PORTION OF IT — PATRIOTISM, 
OR SCOTTICISM OF SCOTT — HIS SPECIAL AFFECTION FOR EDIN- 
BURGH—TIME AND MANNER OF HIS DETERMINATION TO THE 
KOVEL — REVIEW OF THE PROGRESS OF BRITISH PROSE FICTION 
IN THE TWENTY-FIVE YEARS PRECEDING " WAVERLEY," OR FROM 
1789 TO 1814 — TWENTY NOVELISTS IMMEDIATELY PRECEDING SCOTT 

— LADY NOVELISTS — NATIONALITY IN NOVELS — REVOLUTION- 
ARY NOVELS: GODWIN — THE GOTHIC ROMANCE SCHOOL: MRS. 
RADCLIFFE — NOVEL OF ENGLISH MANNERS: MISS AUSTEN — 
RELATIONS OF SCOTT TO HIS PREDECESSORS — THE WAVERLEY 
NOVELS CLASSIFIED — SCOTT THE FOUNDER OF THE HISTORICAL 
NOVEL — LIMITS OF HIS HISTORICAL RESEARCH — IS HIS MEDIE- 
VALISM SOUND? — DEFECT OF SCOTT'S GENIUS — EXCELLENCE OP 
HIS SCOTTISH CHARACTERS — SCOTLAND'S OBLIGATIONS TO HIM 

— YOUNG EDINBURGH, IQl 



LECTURE IV. 

BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

ENUMERATION OF BRITISH NOVELISTS OF THE LAST FORTY-FIVE 
YEARS — STATISTICS OF NOVEL- WRITING DURING THIS PERIOD — 
CLASSIFICATION OP RECENT NOVELS INTO THIRTEEN KINDS — 
SIR LYTTON BULWER'S PROPOSED CLASSIFICATION OP NOVELS, 
AND HIS OWN VERSATILITY — FASHIONABLE NOVELISTS — DICK- 
ENS AND THACKERAY, AS REPRESENTATIVES OF A NEW ERA IN 
THE HISTORY OF THE BRITISH NOVEL— THE TWO COMPARED AS 



;; CONTENTS. 

ARTISTS- COMPARED AS ETHICAL TEACHERS - REALISTIC ART 
AND. ROMANTIC ART IN NOVELS -IMITATIONS OF DICKENS AND 
THACKERAY — THE YEAR 184S AN IMPORTANT YEAR TO DATE 
I-ROM, IN LITERARY AS WELL AS IN POLITICAL HISTORY -PER- 
SEVERING SPIRIT OP REALISM IN RECENT PROSE FICTIONS, AND 
APPLICATION OF THIS SPIRIT TO THE REPRESENTATION OF 
FACTS PECULIARLY CONTEMPORARY; MISS BRONTE, ETC- 
GREAT DEVELOPMENT OF THE NOVEL OP PURPOSE, AS SHOWN 
IN SECTARIAN NOVELS, NOVELS OF THE FORMATION OF CHAR- 
ACTER, NOVELS CURATIVE OR SATIRICIl OP SKEPTICISM, ETC. — 
MR. KINGSLEY AND THE AUTHOR OP "TOM BROWN "— INCREASE 
OF THE POETICAL SPIRIT IN NOVELS- SPECULATIONS AS TO 
THE NOVEL OF THE FUTURE, AND DESIDERATA IN NOVEL- 

214 
WRITING, 



BRITISH NOVELISTS. 



LECTURE I. 

ON THE NOVEL AS A FOKM OF LITERATURE, AND ON 
EARLY BRITISH PROSE FICTION. 

(1.) NATURE OF THE NOVEL.— THE NOVEL A FORM OF PO- 
ETRY — ITS RELATION TO THE EPIC — RELATIVE CAPABILITIES 
OP VERSE AND PROSE IN FICTION — POINTS FOR CRITICISM IN A 
NOVEL — THE THEME, OR SUBJECT — THE INCIDENTS — THE SCE- 
NERY—THE CHARACTERS — EXTRA-POETICAL MERITS. (2.) HIS- 
TORY OF THE NOVEL. — ITS LATE APPEARANCE, COMPARED 
WITH OTHER FORMS OP LITERATURE— CLASSICAL ROMANCES — 
MEDIEVAL FICTIONS — EARLY ITALIAN, FRENCffT^ND SPANISH 
PROSE FICTIONS — EARLY BRITISH ROMANCES — THE " MORT 
D'ARTHUR" — CHAP-BOOK ROMANCES — EARLY ENGLISH TRANS- 
LATION OP FOREIGN NOVELS — MORE'S "UTOPIA," AND SIMILAR 
FICTIONS — SIDNEY'S "ARCADIA," AND PASTORAL NOVELS — 
BOYLE'S "PARTHENISSA," AND CLASSIC-HEROIC NOVELS — BUN- 
YAN'S PILGRIM'S PROGRESS — MRS. APHRA BEHN, AND NOVEL- 
ETTES OP THE RESTORATION. 

If we adopt the common division of Literature 
into History, Philosophical Literature, and Poetry, 
or the Literature of Imagination, then the Novel, 
or Prose Fiction, as the name itself indicates, be- 
longs to the department of Poetry. It is poetry, 
inasmuch as it consists of matter of imagination ; 
but it diifers from what is ordinarily called Poetry, 



12 NATURE OF THE NOVEL. 

inasmuch as the vehicle is not verse, but prose. 
If we wish to define farther the pLace of the 
Novel, in the general department to which it is 
thus assigned, we shall do so best by referring to 
the subdivisions of Poetry itself. There are said 
to be three kinds of Poetry — the Lyric, the Nar- 
rative or Epic, and the Dramatic. This division 
is usually made with respect to Metrical Poetry; 
but it holds also with respe^to the Prose Litera- 
ture of Imagination. The prose counterpart to 
Lyric Poetry or song, is Oratory, or, at least, a 
conceivable species of oratory, which might be 
called the Prose Ode, or Rhapsody. The prose 
counterpart to the Metrical Drama, is, of course, 
the Drama in prose. There thus remains, as the 
prose counterpart to Narrative Poetry, the Ro- 
mance or Novel. The l^ovel, at its highest, is 
a prose Epic; and the capabilities of the Novel, 
as a form of literature, are the capabilities of Nar- 
rative Poetry universally, excepting in as far as 
the use of prose, instead of verse, may involve 
necessary differences. 

This association of the Novel with the narra- 
tive kind of metrical Poetry, — this theory of the 
Novel as being, at its highest, the prose counter- 
part of the Epic, — will be found, I beUeve, not 
unimportant. Apart from any hope it may give 
as to tlie Novel of the future, it is not without 



ITS RELA TIOX TO THE EPIC. 13 

value in reference to our judgment of the novels 
of the past. No one seems recently to have had 
a clearer perception of this than Baron Bunsen. 
" Every romance," he says, in his prefice to one 
of the English translations of the popular Ger- 
man novel Debit and Credit^ "is intended or 
ought to be a new Iliad or Odyssey." Very 
naturally, by those who take a more common 
view of the subject, this statement may be re- 
ceived as a philosophic extravagance. What! a 
Circulating Library novel and the Iliad ; one of 
our thousand-and-one stories of society in Mayfair, 
and Homer's old story of the wanderings of Ulysses 
and Penelope's troubles with her suitors? But, as 
Baron Bunsen is demonstrably right in theory, so 
he is able to verify the theory by an appeal to ex- 
perience. "If we pass in review," he says, " the 
romances of the last three centuries, we shall find 
that those only have arrested the attention of more 
than one or two generations which have satisfied 
this (^. 6., the epic) requirement." In fact, any un- 
willingness that there may be to admit his state- 
ment, will be found to arise from the circumstance 
that people, in testing it, think only of the great 
epics, but think indiscriminately of all novels, small 
as well as great. When we think of the Iliad or 
the Odyssey, or of the "Jerusalem Delivered," or 
of " Paradise Lost," it is certainly difficult to re- 
2 



14 NATURE OF THE NOVEL. 

member a prose romance, or at most more than 
one or two prose romances, that could for a mo- 
ment be seriously put in comparison with such 
works of ej^ic genius. But, on the other hand, if 
there are specimens of the metrical epic with which 
we can hardly dare to compare the best prose 
romances extant, there are as certainly hundreds 
of performances, ranking in the same general class 
of poetry as these epics, which we should as little 
dare to compare, in respect of genius, with some 
of our best novels. Take, as an instance, Don 
Quixote. If we hesitate about elevating this great 
work quite to the altitude of the three or four met- 
rical Epics which the world prefers to all others, 
we have no hesitation whatever in pronouncing 
it a work of far higher and even of more truly 
poetic genius, than many works of narrative verse 
which have yet deservedly earned for their au- 
thors no mean reputation — the metrical stories 
of Dryden, for example, and the Fables and Tales 
of Lafontaine. In short, if we think only of good 
novels in connection with good narrative poems, 
throwing equally out of sight what is inferior in 
both departments, the association of the NoA^el 
with the Epic will not seem so much amiss. At 
all events, in tracing the history of a Novel, there 
will be some advantage in recollecting the asso- 
ciation. The phases through which the Novel 



ITS RELATION TO THE EPIC. 15 

has passed will be found to be not unlike those 
through which Narrative Poetry has passed ; and, 
in any particular country, the Prose Fiction of a 
period will be found to exhibit the characteristics 
seen also in the contemporary Narrative Poetry. 

Perhaps, however, in studying more closely the 
relation thus suggested between the two kinds of 
literature, it is better to use the general phrase, 
"Narrative Poetry," instead of the special word, 
"Epic." For, though Epic Poetry is a term sy- 
nonymous at times with Narrative Poetry, there 
are many varieties of Narrative Poetry which we 
distinguish from what we call peculiarly the Epic. 
There is the metrical Fable, as in Gay and Lafon- 
taine ; there is the light, amorous or humorous 
story in verse, as in Lafontaine again, and parts 
of Prior ; there is the Ballad ; there is the long, 
romantic or pathetic tale, or the comic tale of real 
life, as in Chaucer's " Canterbury Pilgrimage " and 
the rest of his poetry ; there is the satirical bur- 
lesque or mock-heroic, as in Butler's " Hudibras ; " 
there is the pastoral or idyllic phantasy, as in the 
poetry of William Browne or the " Princess " of 
Tennyson ; and there is the sustained heroic and 
allegoric romance, as Spenser's "Faery Queene." 
These, and still other forms of metrical narrative 
that could be named, we distinguish from the Epic 
proper, notwithstanding that in some of them — 



16 NATURE OF TEE NOVEL. 

as in the tales of Chaucer, the idyls of Tennyson, 
and Spenser's great allegoric romance— we have 
specimens of poetic genius which we should hardly 
subordinate to the poems actually called Epics. 
Now, so it is in Prose Fiction. Though Prose 
Fiction corresponds to N'arrative Poetry, the cor- 
respondence is that of two wholes which severally 
consist of corresponding parts. For each variety 
of Narrative Poetry there ^ or there might be, a 
corresponding variety of Prose Fiction. We have 
the Fable in prose; we have the light, amorous or 
humorous story in prose ; the short prose legend 
answers to the Ballad; of romantic or comic prose 
tales of considerable length, but not reaching the 
dimensions of the Novel, most modern languages 
are full; and we have also the prose burlesque, 
the prose pastoral or idyl, and the prose allegoric 
romance. Subtracting these, we have, or we might 
have, as the variety of Prose Fiction answering 
specially to the Epic proper, that serious and 
elaborate kind of composition, styled more ex- 
pressly the Novel, of which worthy specimens 
are so rare, and in which, as in the Epic, the aim 
is to give, as Baron Bunsen says, " a poetic repre- 
sentation of a course of events consistent with 
the highest laws of moral government, whether 
it delineate the general history of a people (the 
lUad as type), or narrate the fortunes of a chosen 



VERSE AND PROSE. 17 

hero (the Odyssey as type)." Bearing all this in 
mind, — bearing in mind that Narrative Poetry 
itself consists of numerous varieties, and that 
Prose Fiction contains, or may contain, varieties 
as numerous and exactly corresponding, — we may 
repeat oar former assertion in a somewhat modi- 
fied shape, and say that the capabilities of any 
form of Prose Fiction are the same as those of 
the equivalent form of Narrative Poetry, what- 
ever that may be, excepting in as far as the sub- 
stitution of prose for verse implies necessary 
abatements or differences. 

Verse or Prose, then — the matter of impor- 
tance lies in that alternative. What can Verse 
do in narrative fiction that Prose cannot? — and, 
on the other hand, are there any compensating 
respects, in which, in the same business. Prose 
has the advantage of Verse t 

In the interest of these questions, I might first 
point out that it is not so easy as it seems to say 
what is merely prose, and what is decidedly verse. 
Where the printer helps us, by dividing and 
arranging lines according to their metrical struc- 
ture, and by leaving wide margins and intervals, 
we recognize verse at once; but beyond that 
point, and in among densely-packed prose itself, 
there may be snatches, and even considerable pas- 
sages, which are good unrhymed verse to the ear, 
2* 



18 NATURE OF THE NOVEL. 

and have all the effect of such, though, for lack of 
the printer's help, the fact is not perceived, and 
though the author himself, not writing with a 
view to certain mechanical arrangements, may 
hardly have intended it. Conventionally, indeed, 
as soon as we get a little way clear out of rhyme, 
we draw a broad mechanical line, and then at 
haphazard call all on one side of this line verse, 
and all on the other side, prose ; although in 
nature and in all natural effect the transition may 
be far more gradual, and much of what we call 
prose is really verse, acting as such on the mind, 
though latent and unaccredited. 

Setting aside this consideration, however, and 
accepting the ordinary conventional distinction 
between verse and what ice call prose, but which 
the ancients more significantly called oratio so- 
luta.) or " loosened speech," — a distinction which 
would be perceptible, although the penman or the 
l^rinter were to neglect those mechanical arrange- 
ments which indicate it, in the main, so con- 
veniently, — let us proceed with our questions. 

What can Verse do, or what has Verse been 
found to do, in the business of narrative fiction, 
which Prose cannot do, or has not been found to 
do so easily? I cannot profess here to exhaust 
this question; but a few hints may serve our 
immediate purpose. 



VERSE AND PROSE. 19 

Versification itself is an art, mastery in which 
wins independent admiration, and is a source of 
independent intellectual pleasure ; and, cceteris pa- 
ribus^ a work delivered over to the human race in 
verse has a greater chance, on this account, of 
being preserved, treated as a classic, and read 
again, or at least spoken of as if it were. Verse 
embalms and conserves the contained meaning, 
whatever may be its intrinsic merit. When, how- 
ever, a writer who has attained the art of verse 
by following a constitutional tendency to it, or 
who has recourse to it in any particular instance 
from a knowledge of its efficacy, does take the 
trouble of throwing a fictitious narrative into the 
form of verse, it is almost obvious that he sets out 
with a predetermination that the matter shall be 
of a rich or serious kind, about the very best in 
its order that he is able to produce ; and also, that 
in consequence of the lower rate at which he must 
proceed, and the greater care and ingenuity which 
he must use, the matter, even without such pre- 
determination, will tend to elevate and refine it- 
self, when it is once in flow. Hence, in general, 
though not universally, high, serious, and very 
heroic themes of poetic interest beg, and almost 
claim, by right of fitness and precedent, to be in- 
vested with the garb of verse; leaving to prose 



20 NATURE OF THE NOVEL. 

such as are of jDlainer or rougher, or less sublime 
and impassioned character. 

But, beyond this, and apart from mere custom, 
as determining the choice of the vehicle before- 
hand. Verse, from its own nature as Yerse, exer- 
cises an influence in the origination or genesis of 
the matter that shall seek conveyance through it, 
— forms that matter, ere it leaves the mind that 
invents it, according to s^il^tle laws of affinity 
with its own mechanism and its conscious powers. 
Verse welcomes certain kinds of matter, and pro- 
claims its adaptation for them ; it rejects other 
kinds of matter, wishes to be excused from them, 
is intolerant of them if forced upon it, and resents 
the intrusion by the uncouthness of the result. 
To speak briefly, the kind of matter for which 
Verse has an aflection, and for which it is fitted, 
is that which is in its nature general, permanent, 
fundamental, ever interesting, least variable by 
time or by j^lace. The prin- iry human emotions 
and relations, and the acts that spring from them 
and illustrate them ; the permanent facts of na- 
ture and of life; the everlasting generalities of 
human thought and human aspiration and diffi- 
culty — these are what lay claim to be sung or 
chanted, while the rest may be simply said. By 
a law of opposites. Verse, the most highly condi- 
tioned^ or, as we say, the most artificial form of 



VERSE AND PROSE. 21 

speech, lays claim to the matter the least condi- 
tioned in fact, and the most radically incorporate 
Avith the primitive basis of nature. The scene of 
every poem must, of course, be laid in some place 
and in some time; every poem must carry in it 
historic elements and references to contemporane- 
ous particulars which are interesting to posterity; 
the costume and the circumstance must be Greek, 
or Roman, or Mediaeval, or English, or Spanish, 
according to the nativity or education of the wri- 
ter ; nor is there any great narrative poem which 
has not a tinge in it of local and national color, 
and is not full of social minutiae. It is neverthe- 
less true that Verse, narrative or other, seeks the 
general under the j^articular, the constant under 
the varying. Moving as it does on wings, it may 
descry all and take cognizance of all, but it can 
rest but here and there on the tips and pinnacles 
of things. In Tennyson's narrative phantasy of 
the " Princess," we have local and temporary color 
to some extent — the English lawn in the pro- 
logue, and the college of " violet-hooded doctors," 
and their feminine lectures on modern geology 
in the tale; but how elemental and air-hung the 
whole story in its beauty, as compared with what 
would probably have been the result had a similar 
phantasy been attempted in prose. 

It is but an extension of this remark, to say that 



22 NATURE OF THE NOVEL. 

there is an inherent fitness in Verse for what is 
highly ideal or poetic intellectually, and for what 
is deeply impassioned. It is from no mere acci- 
dent, no mere deference to custom, that, when 
the imagination exercises itself most purely and 
poetically, it submits itself to the apparent restric- 
tion, but real stimulus of verse ; and that when the 
heart is powerfully touched in its deepest chords, 
the utterance rules itself iby metre and rhyme. 
Perhaps, however, it is less in the general concej)- 
tion and conduct of a poetical story, than in what 
may be called the subsidiary imagery and inven- 
tion, the poetical filling np, that this necessity ap- 
pears. There is hardly any theme or fancy so 
magnificent but that the outline might be given 
in prose ; and in our prose fictions we have in- 
stances of schemes fit for noble poems ; but what 
JProse hesitates to undertake as confidently as 
Verse, is to sustain a story from beginning to 
end, all the parts of which shall be little excur- 
sions in the ideal, independently beautiful and im- 
pressive, and never betraying the flagging of the 
fantastic wing. The " argument," as it is called, 
of the " Princess," or even of " Paradise Lost," 
might have had a fine rendering in prose ; but, 
in the slow conduct of that argument through all 
its parts, what a loss of subsidiary fancy, of poetic 
episode, of wondrously subtle, intellectual combina- 



VERSE AND PROSE. 23 

tions, of flashing images, of rich and luscious word- 
pictures, of rolling harmonies of sound, and ear- 
bewitching cadences! What would have been sub- 
stituted might have been very good, and might for 
other purposes have answered better; but the 
aggregate would have been such as to alter the 
character of the w^ork, and make it less uniformly- 
ideal. 

In what I have said in behalf of Verse, I have 
virtually involved much that ought to go to the 
other side of the account. If, in the business of 
narrative fiction. Prose has its drawbacks, it has, in 
consequence, certain compensations. 

When the Poet, in Goethe's prelude to " Faust," 
is dilating to the Theatre-manager and the Merry- 
Andrew on the grandeur of his craft^^nd on the 
necessity of neglecting the common and the ephem- 
eral, and of striving after that which is permanent 
and will interest posterity, the Merry- Andrew very 
pertinently breaks in : 

" Would of Posterity I heard less mention ! 
Suppose posterity had my attention, 
Who 'd make contemporary fun ? ' 

Kow, " contemporary fun " is a very important 
interest, and Mr. Merryman's remark is capable of 
considerable expansion. Although, when the theme 
or matter is high and serious, it may be worth 



24 NATURE OF TEE NOVEL. 

a writer's trouble to call in the aid of Verse, so as 
to give it the greater chance of conservation, there 
is abundance of very rich and hearty matter in the 
mind of every time for which there is no necessity 
for such preserving labor. There are hundreds of 
notions which the world may be all the better for 
having infused into it through the medium of its 
poetic sense, hundreds of circumstances in every 
time to which contemporary^ttention may be use- 
fully called ; for the inculcation of which notions, 
and the indication of which circumstances, it may 
yet be wholly unnecessary to rouse from her repose 
always the most venerable of the Muses. In the 
great region of the comic, in particular, it may be 
questioned whether Prose has not the wider range, 
and the more searching, furious, and door-breaking 
license. In Chaucer, it is true, and in hundreds of 
other writers of metrical fiction, we have exquisite 
wit and humor ; and from the fact that these writ- 
ers have made verse the vehicle of their fun, their 
fun has the chance of being more than contempo- 
rary. But what it may have gained in one way, 
it may have lost in another. On comparing our 
best specimens of humorous fiction in metre with 
corresponding works of humor in prose, I think 
this will be found to be the case. Riotous humor, 
the humor that provokes laughter at the time, and 
again, days afterwards, when the ludicrous fancy 



VERSE AND PROSE. 25 

recurs to the memory ; that mad kind of humor, 
in especial, which amounts to inspired zanyism, 
and whirls earth and heaven together, as if Puck 
were lord of both — little of this, since the days of 
Aristophanes, has Verse been disjDosed to under- 
take. If any one apparition might here start up 
to contradict me, it might be that of Burns. But 
that, allowing to the fall all that the recollection 
of Burns's humorous poems might suggest, I still 
have in view something different, will be obvious, 
I think, if we recollect sinuiltaneously some of the 
humorous dialogues in Wilson's J^octes Amhrosi- 
anc^. We might agree, I think, to challenge any 
master of verse to render, word for word, and idea 
for idea, without the abatement of something, and 
the substitution of something differentj^one of the 
harangues of Wilson's Ettrick Shepherd. 

Let it not be thought, however, that, in the busi- 
ness of fiction it is solely in the element of humor 
that Prose lays claim to powers indemnifying it for 
its concessions to Verse. As it has a freedom in 
the element of the humorous, greater in some 
respects than belongs to Verse, so in the whole 
region of the historical, and whatever borders on 
that region, it moves with the more intricate and 
insinuating gait. Walking, as it does, on terra 
firma^ and not merely poised on ascending and 
descending wings, it can push its way through the 
3 ^ 



26 NATURE OF THE NOVEL. 

thick and miscellany of things, pass from general- 
ities to particulars, and from particulars back to 
generalities, and come into contact with social 
reality at a myriad points in succession. It is Mr. 
Hall am, I think, who remarks that, with all the 
wealth of social allusion contained in the works of 
the poets, and especially of the comic poets, they 
do not transmit to us so rich a detritus of minutiae 
respecting the laws, the cu^stpms, and the whole 
economy of the defunct life of past generations, 
as do the prose novels of such ages as have pro- 
duced any. Other historians have made the same 
remark, and have even, in writing of particular 
periods, declared that they would have been will- 
ing, as far as their immediate purpose was con- 
cerned, to exchange a whole library of the poets 
of those periods for one tolerably good novel. 
This as regards posthumous historic use; but it 
is evident that there is another and a distinct use 
in the contemporary representations of novelists. 
If Prose can concern itself more intimately than 
Yerse with what is variable in time and place, 
then a prose fiction can take a more powerful hold 
of those eddies of current fact and incident, as 
distinct from the deeper and steadier undercourse 
of things, which, in the language of those who 
look more to the eddies than to the undercurrent, 
constitute a social "crisis." There never was an 



VERSE AND PROSE. 27 

age yet that did not think itself to be in a " cri- 
sis," and that had not probably good reasons for 
thinking so ; but, seeing how rarely the " crisis " 
comes oiF, and how perpetually it is postponed, it 
is perhaps well that there should be such a form of 
literature as the Novel, to engross in sufficiently 
jDoetic shape the humors that are successively dis- 
a23pointed, leaving for the Epic the care of a longer 
accumulation, and the work of a wider survey. 

This leads us to the perception of a third faculty 
of Prose in the business of fiction, identical, per- 
haps, with that just referred to, but capable of 
being separately named. As Prose can be more 
intimate and minute in its historical connections 
than Verse, so for the interfusion of doctrine or 
exposition with fiction. Prose has superior facili- 
ties. While Verse will assume and utter the great 
articles of human faith ; and while, even, after a 
fashion of its own, it will admit of speculation, and 
the evolution of fresh maxim ; yet, for all that 
partakes of the nature of continuous reasoning or 
explication, and especially for efficient action in 
existing social controversy, and for the adminis- 
tration of correctives to existing opinion, Prose is 
better adapted. Hence, although this is not the 
duty of fiction, yet, to the extent to which a prose 
fiction can legitimately outdo a metrical narrative 
in this direction, it may be said to give a more 



28 NATURE OF THE NOVEL. 

various representation of passing life, and to be, 
for not a few purposes, the preferable form of lit- 
erary art. 

I have sometimes thought that much light might 
be cast on this whole question of the relative capa- 
bilities of Prose and Verse in fiction, by a study 
of the incessant shiftings of the Elizabethan drama- 
tists, and especially of Shakspeare, from verse to 
prose, and back again from ^-ose to verse, in the 
course of the same drama, or even of the same 
dramatic act or scene. The study would apply 
mainly to the dramatic kind of fiction, but it 
would help also as between metrical narrative and 
the prose tale or novel. In the main, I believe, 
such an investigation would corroborate wh^t I 
have said. When Falstaff has to talk (and what 
talk it is!), does not Shakspeare make the prepara- 
tion by going into prose ? And what is tlie talk 
of his matchless clowns, but an alternation between 
broken prose and the wildest and most wayward 
lyric? — as if Shakspeare's very idea of a clown 
was that of a being through whom nature blew 
her extreme shreds of deepest sense and of keen- 
est pathos, with nothing connecting or intermedi- 
ate. In this habit or instinct of Shakspeare — 
and the practice is seen not in Falstaff and the 
clowns alone, but in all the similar characters-— 
we seem to have a verification of what has been 



VERSE AND PROSE. 29 

alleged as to the capabilities of Prose in the region 
of humor. The plays afford verifications also of 
what has been alleged as to the capabilities of 
Prose in the regions of the historical and the doc- 
trinal. It is remarkable, however, that it is not 
only on occasions of any of these three kinds that 
Shakspeare passes into prose out of his accus- 
tomed verse, but that, as if bent on leaving his 
testimony to the powers of Prose, where these 
were least expected and least believed in, he has 
often committed to Prose matter so splendid, so 
ideal, so poetical, so ghastly, that, but that the 
thing , is done, and done by him, theory would 
have called it a hopeless treachery to the rights 
of Yerse. Take, as an instance, Hamlet's speech 
about himself: r — 

" I have of late (but wherefore I know not) lost all my mirth, 
forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily 
with my disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to 
me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, 
look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical 
roof fretted with golden fire — why, it appeareth nothing to me 
but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece 
of work is Man ! How noble in reason ! how infinite in facul- 
ties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in 
action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! 
the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, 
.3* 



30 NATURE OF THE NOVEL. 

to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; 
no, nor woman neither." 

With such passages in view, and remembering 
also that, as Verse was the rule with Shakspeare, 
and Prose only the exception, he is likely to have 
informed us only what Prose could peculiarly do, 
and not of all that it could do, need we be surprised 
at that note of Coleridge's, oh-the " wonderfulness 
of Prose," in which, fancying the impression for 
the first time of a piece of nobly modulated prose 
on the minds of a crowd hitherto accustomed 
only to verse, he protests that the effect of such 
a disclosure of the powers of oratio soluta, or 
" loosened speech," must have been like the rev- 
elation of a new agency, the bursting of a brave 
ship into a new and boundless sea. Need we 
shrink, either, from anticipating for Prose triumphs 
even in Verse's own regions of the imaginative 
and the impassioned, such as yet have hardly been 
dreamt of? Need we shrink from supposing that, 
as Prose is still the younger and the invading occu- 
pant, and as already it has chased Verse from the 
busy coasts, and the flat and fertile lowlands, so it 
may encroach farther and farther still, planting its 
standards along the looming line of the hills, and 
even in the mouths of long-withdrawing glens, till 
at lengtli Verse, sacred and aboriginal Verse, shall 



THE THEME, OR SUBJECT. 31 

take refuge in the remotest fastnesses of the raoun- 
tams, and live, sad, but unconquerable, amid the 
mists, the cataracts, and the peak-loving eagles ? 

Settle as we may this question of the relative 
capabilities of the Prose Fiction and the Metrical 
Fiction, it remains true that they are closely allied 
as the two forms of narrative poesy, and that there 
are canons of criticism common to both. Let us 
leave out of account the minor varieties of prose 
fiction, and attend only to the elaborate romance 
or novel. 

In a prose romance or novel, as in a narrative or 
heroic poem, the first or main matter of interest 
for the critic, is the scheme, the idea, the total 
meaning, the aim, the impression, the^mibject. Is 
the idea great and deep, or is it small and trivial ? 
Is the subject slight and teinporary, or is it noble, 
large, and enduring ? The subjects that a poet or 
a novelist selects are, like those that a painter se- 
lects, allegories of his entire mental state, or at 
least of his aspirations as they are compromised by 
his circumstances. What a man, left to his own 
freedom, chooses, out of the miscellany of things, 
as a theme for poetic representation, is something 
that strikes him, that has a meaning for him, an 
affinity with his character, his past experience, his 
education, his sentimental peculiarities, his natural 



32 NATURE OF THE NOVEL.- 

or acquired mode of thinking. In all cases, there- 
fore, the subject or theme of a poetic work is a 
promise for or against it. If, in a novel, the theme 
or idea is important, — if it is the object of the 
author to seize and to represent in a mimic world 
of ideal characters and situations the deepest pecu- 
liarities of the life of a time ; or if he selects some 
23ortion of past or present social fact, and throws 
that into his mimic world ; W if, with some dis- 
tinct metaphysical meaning in his mind, he casts 
that into symbolic form in the actions of imaginary 
personages, — in any of these cases the probable 
value and interest of his performance may be so 
far guessed beforehand. Without knowing any- 
thing farther, for example, of Cervantes' great 
novel than that it is a. story of two characters, the 
one a lofty but crazed Idealist, and the other a 
sturdy Materialist, wandering in company in search 
of adventures over a sunny land still covered with 
the wrecks of a rich civiHzation, and mingling with 
its peasants, its nobles, and its gipsies, — the curi- 
osity is roused, and the book seems worthy of 
attention. Or, again, to state the matter differ- 
ently, the novelist, as the creator of his mimic 
world, is also its providence ; he makes the laws 
that govern it ; he conducts the lines of events to 
their issue ; he winds up all according to his judi- 
cial wisdom. It is possible, then, to see how far 



THE THEME, OR SUBJECT. 33 

his laws of moral government are in accordance 
Avith those that rule the real course of things, and 
so, on the one hand, how deeply, and with wliat 
accuracy he has studied life, and, on the other, 
whether, after his study, he is a loyal member of 
the human commonwealth, or a rebel, a cynic, a 
son of the wilderness. In short, the measure of 
the value of any work of fiction, ultimately and 
on the whole, is the worth of the speculation, the 
philosophy, on which it rests, and Avhich has en- 
tered into the conception of it. This may be 
demurred to; but it will, I believe, be found to 
be true. No artist, I believe, will, in the end, be 
found to be greater as an artist than he was as a 
thinker. Not that he need ever have expressed 
his speculative conclusions, or have seemed capable 
of expressing them, otherwise than through the 
medium and in the language of his art ; nor even 
that, while engaged in one of his works, he need 
have been thoroughly conscious of the meaning he 
was infusing into it. At the same time, the proba- 
bility is that unconsciousness on the part of an 
artist of the meaning of his own works is more 
rare than is supposed. Whatever Shakspeare can 
be found to have done, there is a considerable like- 
lihood that he knew he was doing. 

Next to the general conception or intention of a 
novel, and as the means by which that conception 



34 NATURE OF THE NOVEL. 

or intention is either successfully achieved or ends 
in failure, the critic attends chiefly to three things 

— the incidents, the scenery, and the characters. 
The invention or imagination of incident is, at 

least, as important a part of the Novelist's work as 
it is of the work of the Narrative Poet. On this 
depends what is called the construction, the inter- 
est of the plot. True merit in this particular will 
be found to be but a detailed form of that merit 
which consists in the general creation of the story 

— the so-called " incidents " being events more or 
less consistent with the idea of that mimic world, 
whether meant as a facsimile of the real, or as an 
imaginary variation from it, which the author had 
in view from the first. On this head, therefore, I 
will offer but two remarks. In the first place, 
notions as to what constitutes a sufficiency of this 
merit in a novel are likely to differ much, accord- 
ing to the degree of the reader's culture. Some 
of the greatest w^orks of fiction would be thrown 
aside as wearisome by those whose appetite is for 
"thrilling interest;" and, on the other hand, many 
novels of " thrilling interest " have no interest at 
all for those whose tastes have been well educated. 
In the second place, however, it is the habit of a 
large class of cultivated readers to find fault too 
thoughtlessly, in some cases, with a certain order 
of incidents which lead to the "thrilling' sensa- 



THE INCIDENTS. 35 

tion — those, namely, which have the character of 
so-called improbability. In novels of real life, the 
improbability of an incident may well be its con- 
demnation. If, however, there may be novels of 
other kinds, — if Prose Fiction is to be allowed any- 
thing like the range of Narrative Poetry, — there is 
no reason why, to the extent to which it is allowed 
this range, it should not have the same liberty — 
the liberty of purely ideal incident in a purely 
ideal world. If, for example, we never mutter this 
word " improbability " in reading Keats' " Endym- 
ion," or Spenser's " Faery Queene," simply because 
we know that Ave are in a world of fantastic condi- 
tions, then, so far as we admit that Prose may 
make similar excursions into the realms of pure 
imagination, our attachment to probability of inci- 
dent must, in prose fiction also, be permitted to 
grow weak. As novels go, resentment of improb- 
ability of incident is a wholesome critical feeling ; 
but, if made absolute, the rule would simply amount 
to this, that there should be no prose fiction what- 
ever but the novels of real life. From this I, for 
one, dissent, as an illegal arrest upon the powers 
of Prose. But, indeed, we all dissent from any 
such opinion. What else but a dissent from it 
is the distinction we make between the Romance 
and the Novel? I have not hitherto recognized 
this distinction, nor do I care to recognize it very 



36 NATURE OF THE NOVEL. 

strictly, because, after all, it is one more of popular 
convenience than of invariable fitness. A Romance 
originally meant anything in prose or in verse writ- 
ten in any of the Romance languages; a Novel 
meant a new tale, a tale of fresh interest. It Avas 
convenient, however, seeing that the two words 
existed, to appropriate them to separate uses ; and 
hence, now, when we speak of a Romance, we 
generally mean " a fictitioub-«arrative, in prose or 
verse, the interest of which turns upon marvellous 
and uncommon incidents ; " and when we sj^eak of 
a Novel, we generally mean " a fictitious narrative 
differing from the Romance, inasmuch as the in- 
cidents are accommodated to the ordinary train 
of events and the modern state of society." If 
we adopt this distinction, we make the prose Ro- 
mance and the Novel the two highest varieties 
of prose fiction, and Ave allow in the prose Ro- 
mance a greater ideality of incident than in the 
Novel. In other words, where we find a certain 
degree of ideality of incident, we call the work 
a Romance. 

In Novels or prose Romances, as in narrative 
poems, much of the interest depends on the au- 
thor's power of description ; ^. e., on his faculty in 
the imagination of scenery. Much of the interest, 
I have said ; but much of the benefit also. A re- 
mark' here occurs, akin to what I have just been 



THE SCENERY. 37 

saying. In our novels of real life we have no lack 
of descriptions of the ordinary places of social re- 
sort, and of all their objects and circumstantials — 
the interior of a house in town, or of a mansion in 
the country ; a merchant's counting-house, or the 
quadrangle of a college ; a squalid city lane, or the 
quiet street of a village ; the theatre on the night 
of a royal visit, or a court of justice during the trial 
of a great criminal ; the inside of an omnibus, or of 
a railway carriage, on its journey ; or the deck or 
cabin of a steamer, on its river or ocean voyage. 
All this is well ; and, in proportion to the fidelity 
with which such scenes are reproduced, we admire 
the descriptive powers of the artist. But is it not 
well also — in these days especially, when so many 
of us, cooped up in cities and chained to this part 
or that of the crowded machinery of complex civil- 
ization, have all but lost our acquaintance with our 
ancient mother earth, and hardly know even the 
overhanging sky, except in ribbands over streets, 
and as giving picturesqueness to chimneys — is it 
not well, is it not medicinal, that, as much as possi- 
ble, in the pages of our novelists, as in those of 
our narrative poets, we should be taken away in 
imagination from our common social haunts, pnd 
placed in situations where Nature still exerts upon 
Humanity the unbroken magnetism of her inani- 
mate bulk, — soothing into peace in the qniet mead- 

4 



38 NATURE OF THE NOVEL. 

ows, whispering of the unearthly in the depths 
of a forest, telUng tales of the past in some- soli- 
tary, crumbling ruin, moaning her sorrow hi the 
gusts of a moor at midnight, or dashing the eter- 
nal monotone of her many voices against a cliff- 
embattled shore ? 

It is, however, by his characters that a novelist 
is chiefly judged ; and the most esteemed part of a 
novelist's genius is his power in the imagination of 
character. In this is included the imagination of 
physiognomy and corporeal appearance, as well as 
the imagination of feelings, states of disposition, 
and modes of thought and speech. What a func- 
tion of genius, wdiether in metrical poesy or in fic- 
tion in j)rose, is this of the creation of ideal beings! 
Already, in the very air over our heads, and in 
contact, nay in interfusion and connection, with 
the actual world to which we belong, and which 
we help forward by our action, flutters there not 
another and invisible world of secondary origin, in- 
tellectually peopled by troops of beings that have 
taken wing into it, flight after flight, these three 
thousand years past, from the teeming brains of 
Inen and of poets ? All around us, and in the very 
air over our heads, do there not move and bustle 
at this moment, and even act upon us through 
thought and memory, myriads of beings, born at 
diflerent dates — some ages ago, and some but yes- 



THE CHARACTERS. 39 

terclay — forming, in their union, a great popula- 
tion ; headed and ruled, let us say, by the Achil- 
leses, the Ajaxes, the CEdipuses, the Antigones, the 
^neases, the Tancreds, the Lears, the Hamlets, 
the Macbeths, the Fausts, and the Egmonts of our 
greater Fables, but divided also, like our own mor- 
tal world, into grades inferior to these, and more 
numerous and more ordinary as they descend ; con- 
taining, too, as our own world does, wild and un- 
couth and exquisite or melancholy spirits, that 
shoot from grade to grade, or circle strangely by 
themselves — Pantagruels and Panurges, Jaqueses 
and Ariels, Redgauntlets and Dirk Hatteraicks, 
Mignons, Meg Merrilieses and Little Nells ? What 
are these but beings that now are, but once were 
not — creatures that once existed onlyiS~the minds 
of poets and inventors, but that, w^hen they were 
fully fashioned there, were flung loose into Nature, 
as so many existences, to live for evermore and 
roam amid its vacancies ? Nay, from every new 
romance or fiction does there not take flight a new 
troop of such beings to increase the number of 
these potent invisibles? To what may all this 
tend ? We talk of spirits, of ghosts, of demons, as 
anterior to, and coeval with, human history, by vir- 
tue of a separate origin when Nature's constituents 
were once for all prearranged and rolled together 
in their mystic harmony. Here we have them as 



40 NATURE OF THE NOVEL. 

appended on to human history, and organically de- 
veloped out of it. In a metaphysical sense, these 
phantoms of the human imagination are things, ex- 
istences, parts of the world as it is, equally with 
the rocks which we tread, the trees which we see 
and can touch, and the clouds that sail in the blue 
above us. May they not, then, have a function in 
the 7'eal evolution of the future ? 

There are other matters ^11 which the critic is 
bound to attend to, in examining prose fictions. 
Not to dwell on the most obvious of these, — as, 
for example, the merit or demerit of the literary 
style, — I will mention but one thing to be borne 
in mind in the criticism of a novel. This is the 
merit or demerit of its extra-poetical contents. A 
large portion of the interest of every poem or 
work of fiction consists in the matter which it 
contains in addition to the pure poetry or fiction. 
In Shakspeare or in Wordsworth there is much 
that we value besides what is properly the poetry 
— philosophical disquisition, for example, or lumin- 
ous propositions on all subjects and sundry, or 
fragments of historical fact and description, intro- 
duced into the verse or the dialogue by the way, 
and poetical only in as far as they are put into 
the mouth of an imagined character, or connected 
with an imagined occasion. We call a work great, 
in virtue of its pleasing or stirring us in many 



EXTRA-POETICAL MERITS. 41 

ways; and, whatever is the nominal form of a 
work, we thankfully accept all kinds of good 
things that can artistically be brought into it. So, 
in a novel, if the writer can contrive, consistently 
with poetic method, or even sometimes by a slight 
strain on that method, to give us valuable matter 
over and above the mere fiction or story, we ought 
to allow all that is so given to go to his credit. 
As an example of a novel in which speculation, or 
critical and philosophical remark on many things, 
is blended in large proportion with the pure fic- 
tion, I may name Goethe's' Wilhehn Meister. The 
novels of Scott, and the Promessi /S2)0si of Man- 
zoni, will occur to you as works in which, along 
with the fiction, we get valuable fragments of 
authentic history. . 

So much by way of theory of the Prose Fiction 
as an existing and matured form of literature; 
and now for the History of this form of literature, 
more particularly amongst ourselves. 

The first and most notable fiict in the history of 
this form of literature is its late appearance, as 
compared with other forms. This fact resolves 
itself into a still more general fact — the historical 
priority of Verse to Prose. In speaking of these 
two modes of literature, I have hitherto repre- 
sented them as modes existing together, and 
4* 



42 HISTORY OF THE NOVEL. 

equally available, according to the option of the 
writer and the nature of his task ; and I have but 
incidentally hinted that, though coordinate now, 
they are not coeval. To this matter of their rela- 
tive antiquity it is necessary now to attend. 

That Verse is the more ancient, is a fact known 
to all. I am not sure, however, that we are in the 
habit of conceiving the fact with sufficient dis- 
tinctness, or with a sufficient sense of all that it 
includes. The fact, it seems to me, amounts to 
nothing less than this — that Song, or rhj^thmical 
utterance, was the original form of all human 
speech; just as the mode of thinking and feeling, 
natural to such rhythmical utterance, was the orig- 
inal mode of all human consciousness ; or as if, 
risking an analogous assertion, we were to say 
that men originally did not walk, but danced and 
leaped rhythmically. At all events, the earliest 
literature of all kinds — History and Philosophy, 
as well as Poetry — was in the form of Song. To 
adopt an image suggested by the old designation 
of Verse as oratio mncta^ or "bound speech," and 
of Prose, contrariwise, as oratio soliita^ or " loos- 
ened speech," we are to fancy all kinds of human 
thought and mental activity as originally dammed 
up in Song, as in a lake with steep embankments 
— not only poetic or imaginative thought, and 
feeling or emotion, but also whatever of historical 



ITS LATE APPEARANCE. 43 

record or tradition and of si^ecnlative doctrine or 
philosophy may be conceived to have been in ex- 
istence. By a natural law, this lake ovei-flows and 
bursts forward in "loosened speech," — the stream 
throwing off, in its advance, first one form, and 
then another, of literatm-e, according as human 
thought, becoming less and less homogeneous, is 
found to demand corresponding diversity in the 
modes of its expression. First, History is thrown 
off; then Philosoi)hical Discourse is thrown off; 
then practical Oratory is thrown off: Verse reliev- 
ing itself thereby, first of the business of record, 
next of that of speculative activity, next of that 
of direct social and moral stimulation — except in 
as far as in each of these kinds of literature, thus 
detached out of its own body. Verse ^ay think it 
right to retain a parental interest. But, even after 
History, Science, and Oratory are thrown off, and 
Verse has retained to itself only Lyric Poetry, 
Narrative Poetry, and Dramatic Poetry, it does 
not retain these in homogeneous form, and within 
the same channel. Not only do differences evolve 
themselves in the metrical forms of the three kinds 
of Poetry, — the Drama loosening itself into a lax 
metre nearly approaching Prose, the Epic or Nar- 
rative reserving somewhat more of metrical law, 
and the Lyric remaining locked up in the strictest 
metrical bonds of all, — but each of these varieties 



44 HISTORY OF THE NOVEL. 

of metrical Poesy shows a tendency to detacli 
from itself a corresponding variety of actual Prose. 
Theoretically, we should have expected, perhaps, 
that the order of detachment would have been as 
follows: — first, the Prose Drama; secondly, the 
Fictitious Prose N'arrative ; and lastly, and with 
greatest difficulty, the Prose Ode or Lyric. In 
fact, however, when we make our examination in 
ancient literature, we find'^he Fictitious Prose 
Narrative making its appearance before any extant 
specimen of the Prose Drama. And yet, at how 
late a period in the whole history of the Classical 
Literature this appearance takes j^lace ! The Ho- 
meric period of the Grecian Epic was over ; the 
period of Pindar and the Greek Lyric Muse was 
over; the glorious dramatic erii of ^schylus, 
Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, was over ; 
Greece had had her great historians in Herodotus 
and Thucydides, her great jDhilosophic period in 
Plato and Aristotle, her noblest period of prose 
oratory in Demosthenes and his contemporaries; — ■ 
all this was i^ast and gone, and Greek Literature 
was in its dregs, before any specimens of the Prose 
Fiction, corresponding to what we should now call 
a Romance or a Novel, were produced in the 
Greek tongue. 

If we except Xenophon, as the author of the 
Cyropcedia^ and one or two others, whose names 



ITS LATE APPEARANCE. 45 

have been preserved, though then* works have 
perished, the first Greek writers of j^i'ose fiction 
were Ileliodorus, Achilles Tatius, and Longus — 
all of whom lived after the third century of our 
era. In Latin, then the other language of the 
civilized world, the Prose Fiction had previously 
made its appearance in the Satyricon of Petronius 
Arbiter, and the Golden Ass of Apuleius — both 
of whom lived in the second century, after the 
list of the greater Poman classics had been closed. 
When we look into the works themselves, we can 
see that, by their nature, they belong to an age 
when the polytheistic system of society was in its 
decrepitude. They are, most of them, stories of 
the adventures of lovers, carried away by pirates 
or otherwise separated by fate — throWn from city 
to city of the Mediterranean coasts, in each of 
which they see strange sights of sorcery and 
witchcraft, are present at religious processions, 
private festivals, crucifixions and the like, become 
entangled in crimes and intrigues, and have hair's- 
breadth escai3es from horrible dens of infamy; 
sometimes even changed by magic into beasts ; 
but at last reunited and made happy by some 
sudden and extraordinary series of coincidences. 
There is a force of genius in some of them ; and 
tliey are interesting historically, as illustrating the 
state of society towards the close of the Poman 



46 miSTORY OF THE NOVEL. 

empire ; but the general impression which they 
leave is stifling, and even appalling — as of a world 
shattered into fragments, the air over each in- 
habited fragment stagnant and pestilential, and 
healthy motion nowhere, save in some inland 
spots of grassy solitude, and in the breezes that 
blow over the separating bits of sea. One of the 
most curious features in them, as compared with 
the earlier classic poetry, is the more important 
social influence they assign to the passion of love, 
and, consequently, the more minute attention they 
bestow on the psychology of that^ passion, and the 
increased liberty of speech and action they give 
to women. Another respect in which they differ 
from the earlier Greek and Latin works of fiction, 
is the more minute, and, as we might say, more 
modern style in which they describe physical ob- 
jects, and especially scenery. This is most observ- 
able in the Greek romances. It is as if the sense 
of the picturesque in scenery then began to appear 
more strongly than before in literature. In the 
Daphnis and Chloe of Longus, wliich is a sweet 
pastoral romance of the single island of Lesbos, 
there are descriptions of the varying aspects and 
the rural labors of the seasons, such as we find in 
modern pastoral poems. 

In the modern world, as well as tlie ancient, the 
Prose Fiction was one of the last forms of litera- 



CLASSICAL ROMANCES. 47 

tiire to be arrived at; and this, notwithstanding 
that the fictions of the ancients survived to show 
the way, and to suggest imitation. 

For the first six centuries, indeed, of what is 
called the Mediaeval j^eriod, or from the sixth cen- 
tury to the twelfth, there was scarcely any litera- 
ture whatever, in any of the modern European 
tongues, — these tongues not having then been 
formed, or not having extricated themselves with 
sufficient pliancy out of the chaos caused by the 
confusion of the Gothic with the Latin. In what 
remained of the Greek or Byzantine empire, stories 
or novels were occasionally written in the Greek 
tongue, which still continued there intact ; — the 
most noted of these being The Lives of Barlaam 
and Josaphat^ a spiritual or ecclesiastical romance 
of the eighth century by St. John Damascenus ; in 
which, under the guise of the adventures of Josa- 
phat, the son of an Indian king, who is converted 
to Christianity against his father's will by the holy 
Barlaam, and at last becomes a monk or hermit, 
the Greek form of Christianity is expounded, and a 
monkish life is recommended. Among the Arabs 
and other Orientals of the same period, prose tales 
were far more abundant. The celebrated collec- 
tion of the Thousand-and-one Nights — consist- 
ing of tales of hunchbacks, merchants, and genii, 
which had been told in the bazaars of India, and 



48 HISTORY OF THE NOVEL. 

Other parts of the East, till they had become the 
common possession of the oriental imagination — 
were redacted into their Arabic form in the golden 
age of Arabic culture under the Caliphs of Bagdad. 
Meanwhile, in the European West, what literature 
there was — if we except heroic metrical legends 
of the Scandinavians and Germans of the conti- 
nent, and a somewhat more various, though still 
scanty vernacular literature among our insular 
Anglo-Saxons — consisted of writings, chiefly theo- 
logical and historical, in the universal ecclesias- 
tical Latin. Of this mediaeval Latin literature of 
Europe, the portion most nearly approaching the 
Prose Fiction in its nature, was that which con- 
sisted in the numberless legends of the Lives 
of the Saints^ — narratives, however, which were 
offered, and I'ead as history, and not as fiction. 
Prose Fiction, in fact, as we now understand it, 
reappeared in Euroj^e only after the vernacular 
languages had j^ushed themselves 2)ublicly through 
the Latin, as the exponents, in each jDarticular 
nation, of the popular as distinct from the learned 
thought ; nor did it reappear even in these vernac- 
ular languages, until they had well tried then^selves 
first in other forms of literature, and especially in 
metrical forms. The outburst of modern vernac- 
ular literature, simultaneously, or nearly so, in the 
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in the various 



MEDIAEVAL FICTION. 41) 

European nations, was, it is needless to say, metri- 
cal ; and the evolution of the prose forms out of 
their metrical beginnings, took place by the same 
process as in the history of Ancient Literature, — 
more rapidly, however, and with some obvious and. 
striking exceptions, in consequence of the inherit- 
ance of so much of the prose literature of the 
ancients, and in consequence of the practice which 
some of the vernacular writers already had in 
Latin prose. 

Li the countries speaking the Romance tongues, 
or tongues derived from the Latin, the vernacular 
outburst took place, as all know, in two distinct 
jets or streams of poetry, — represented severally, 
in France, by the Lyric Poetry of the southern 
Troubadours, and the Narrative Poetry of the 
northern Trouveurs. Out of these two forms, 
both metrical, of early vernacular literature (and, 
doubtless, the same double tendency to the Lyric 
on the one hand, and to the ISTarrative on the 
other, is to be discerned in the contemporary 
efforts of the German Minnesingers), the various 
European literatures gradually developed them- 
selves. 

It was out of the IsTarrative Poetry of the Trou- 
veurs, or out of whatever was analogous to that 
elsewhere than in France, that the Prose Fiction 
might be expected most naturally to arise. And 
5 



50 HISTORY OF THE NOVEL, 

yet, what do we see ? Though the passion for nar- 
rative all over feudal Europe was something un- 
precedented ; though the demand of the lords and 
ladies in their castles, of the peasants in their huts, 
and of the burghers in their households, was still 
for stories, stories ; though, to satisfy this demand, 
the minstrels, and those who supplied them Avith 
their wares, invented, borrowed, translated, ampli- 
fied^ and stole — now rehearsing known facts and 
genealogies, now collecting and shaping legends in 
which the facts and personages of Mediasval His- 
tory were worked into romances of chivalry, now 
catching up classic stories of the ancient world and 
rejDroducing Alexander as a knight-errant and Vir- 
gil as a great magician, now fetching a subject out 
of ecclesiastical lore, now adai^ting some Byzan- 
tine or Oriental tale which had been brought west- 
ward by the Crusades, now tasking their own 
powers of fmcy for additions to the horrors of the 
popular Demon ology, and now only telling comic 
and Hcentious tales of real life ; — yet, with few 
exceptions, all this immense trade in narrative lit- 
erature, so far as it was vernacular and not Latin, 
v/as carried on in verse. Even the Fabliaux, or 
facetious tales of real life, were, in great part, met- 
rical. This was the kind of composition, however, 
v/hich tended most naturally to prose ; and hence, 
besides that in all countries tliere must have been 



MEDIyEVAL FICTION. 51 

liunclrecls of very early Fabliaux, passing from 
mouth to mouth as rude Ytrose jocosities, Ave find 
that in one country at least the earliest form of 
classic i^rose fiction was after this type. 

A peculiarity of Italy, as compared with other 
lands, was that, though the taste for the narrative 
as well as for the lyric kind of poetry was felt 
there as strongly as elsewhere, and influenced the 
rising vernacular literature, the historical condi- 
tions of the country, in its transition through the 
middle ages, had not been such as to provide for 
that narrative taste a fund of material in the nature 
of a national legend or epic. Hence, in founding 
the modern literature of Italy, the genius of Dante 
employed itself, not on any national stoiy, but on 
a theme wholly self-constructed, wide as the world 
physically, and morally as deej^ as the universal 
human reason ; and hence, when it chanced that, 
after Dante's poetry, and the passionate lyrics of 
Petrarch, the next demand of the Italian vernac- 
ular genius was for a work of prose fiction, the 
answer to the demand was the Decameron of 
Boccaccio (1313 — 1375). These short novels of 
gallanti'y — collected from various sources, and 
only invested by Boccaccio with the charms of his 
Italian style — may be regarded as the first no- 
ticeable specimens of finished prose fiction in the 
vernacular literature of modern Euroi^e. The type 



52 HISTORY OF THE NOVEL. 

of prose fiction which Boccaccio had thus intro- 
duced, and which may be called the Italian type, 
was continued, with some variations, by his Ital- 
ian successors of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and six- 
teenth centuries, — Sachetti, Cintio, etc. ; but, 
early in this last century, a new style of fiction, 
the so-called Pastoral Romance, was introduced 
into Italy in the Arcadia of the N'eapolitan San- 
nazaro. 

In France, the earliest prose fictions, besides 
mere Fabliaux and romantic stories belonging to 
the common stock of the Trouveurs all over Eu- 
rope, were versions of those tales of chivalry, 
relating to the exploits of Charlemagne and his 
peers, which, from the twelfth century onwards, 
formed the national epic of France. It was not 
till the fifteenth century that these had run their 
course, and that, to satisfy the tastes of the courtly 
classes of society, novelettes of gallantry, in imi- 
tation of those of Boccaccio, were introduced. 
Later still, France produced a perfectly original, 
and to this day almost unique, example of the fic- 
tion of satiric humor in the works of Francois 
Rabelais (1483— 1553 ). The " Pantagruelism " of 
Rabelais, and new batches of the short novels of 
love-intrigue, sufficed as prose fiction for France, 
until that country also received a Pastoral Ro- 
mance of unconscionable length and tediousness 



i 



EARLY ITALIAN AND FRENCH NOVELS. 53 

in the Astree of D'Urfe, the first part of which 
aj^peared iu 1610. 

No part of Europe contributed more richly to 
the early modern Prose Fiction than the Spanish 
Peninsula. The wars of the Goths and the Moors 
in Spain had transmitted, in abundance, legends 
for a national epic, which had been embodied in 
long metrical poems, and in warlike songs and bal- 
lads. Some of these, jDcrhaps, with other more 
ordinary narratives, had also taken the shape of 
prose. It was towards the close of the fourteenth 
century, however, that Yasco Lobeyra, a Portu- 
guese by birth, seizing a subject that did not ap- 
pertain in particular to the Spanish Peninsula, but 
to the general fund of European tales of chivalry, 
wrote his famous Amadis de 6^««?J^called "the 
Iliad of the prose romances of knight-errantry." 
Subsequent Spanish romances of knight-errantry, 
in some of which Amadis was still the hero, and 
in others another imaginary personage named 
Palmerin, were numberless in the fifteenth and 
sixteenth centuries, — the most celebrated being 
that called The Palmerin of England. Mean- 
while, the Spanish genius for prose fiction was 
showing itself in other styles. The Pastoral Ro- 
mance, known in Italy, as we have seen, as early as 
the beginning of the sixteenth century, is believed 
to have been more peculiarly of Portuguese ori- 
5* 



54 HISTORY OF THE NOVEL. 

gill ; and, after it had been cultivated by Portu- 
guese poets, it was naturalized in Castilian j^iose 
by Monte mayor, a writer of Portuguese birth 
(1520—1562). The Diana of Montemayor had 
nearly as many imitators as the Amadis de Gaul^ 
and attained nearly as great celebrity out of 
Spain. A third type of Spanish prose fiction was 
the so-called Picaresque Novel, or novel of clever 
roguery, the first specimen ^ Avhich was the Life 
of Lazarillo de Tonnes^ by Diego Mendoza, one 
of the most celebrated statesmen of the reign of 
Charles V. (1503 — 1575). Among the many Span- 
ish imitations of this j^eculiar style of comic j^rose 
fiction, which other countries were to borrow from 
Spain, the best known is Don Guzman de Alfa- 
rache^ published in 1599. It was a few years after 
this tliat Cervantes, after having trained himself 
in almost every kind of literature then known in 
Spain, the Drama and the Pastoral Romance in- 
cluded, united all the previous kinds of Spanish 
prose fiction, and superseded them all, in his im- 
mortal Don Quixote. The first j^art of this mas- 
terjDiece was j^ublished in 1605; the last in 1615, 
the year before the author's death.^ 

1 It is right that tlie reader should know tliat I am not per- 
sonally acquainted with all the works of early foreign prose 
fiction mentioned in the preceding paragraphs, hut chiefly with 
those of Boccaccio, Rabelais, and Cervantes. 



EARLY BRITISH ROMANCES. 55 

Thus, by the beginning of the seventeenth cen- 
tury, Prose Fiction, in most of its leading types — 
th.'it of the short, amusing novel of gallantry, that 
of the romance of enchantment and heroic chiv- 
alry, that of the pastoral romance, that of the riot- 
ous satire, and that of the picaresque novel — was 
an established form of literature, existing side by 
side with Narrative Poetry, Lyrical Poetry, Dra- 
matic Poetry, History, etc., in the various Romance 
tongues of Europe. In Germany, where the ver- 
nacular development did not proceed so fast, there 
were yet, by this time, characteristic specimens of 
prose fiction, as well as of verse, in popular tales of 
Gothic demonology, and in pithy, satiric and moral 
fables, expressive of the German common sense. 

In no country was the impulse to the narrative 
form of literature earlier or stronger than in Brit- 
ain. The Norman Conquest, interrupting the na- 
tive tendencies of the Saxons, which had been 
rather to the practical and ethical, handed over 
tlie initiation and conduct of a new literature in 
England to those who were preeminently the 
Trouveurs of Europe — i. e., to the Norman min- 
strels. Perhaps more of the distinguished Nor- 
man Trouveurs of the twelfth and thirteenth cen- 
turies were born on the English than on the French 
side of the Channel; and so powerful was the in- 



56 HISTORY OF THE NOVEL. 

fusion into England of Trouveur or Narrative, as 
distinct from the Troubadour or Lyrical spirit, 
that, in the whole course of English literature 
since, one can see the narrative impulse rulirig, 
and the lyric subordinate. The passion for narra- 
tive showed itself not in the French Trouveurs 
alone, but also in their brethren, the Latin Chroni- 
clers. In part, indeed, the Trouveurs were also 
Chroniclers, writing in FreiKih those Bruts, or leg- 
endary genealogies of Britain, and those records 
of recent Norman exploits, which also furnished 
matter to the prose chroniclers in Latin. But 
their characteristic productions were the French 
metrical romances. For such romances they had 
an unusually rich fund of topics. Besides the 
common classical and mediaeval subjects of Al- 
exander, Charlemagne, and the like, and besides 
subjects invented by their Norman imagination, 
or suggested by incidents of Norman history, or 
derived from their ancestral stock of Scandina- 
vian legend, they came into possession, in virtue of 
their occupation of British ground, of that won- 
derful body of Arthurian romance, which, be- 
queathed in its original by the Welsh and Armo- 
rican bards, and afterwards compiled in Latin by 
the Welsh pen of Geoifrey of Monmouth, was to 
receive expansions and modifications at the will 
of future poets. Metrical French Romances of 



EARLY BRITISH ROMANCES. 57 

King Alexander, King Horn, Havelok the Dane, 
etc., and French Romances of Chivahy about Ar- 
thur and his Knights of the Round Table, were 
the entertainment of the Norman lords and their 
retainers, as long as French was the dominant 
tongue in England. Some of these Romances, 
with lighter Fabliaux, had passed into French 
prose versions. The earliest English narrative 
poetry consists mainly of translations of these Ro- 
mances for the behoof of those who did not under- 
stand French; and, as was natural, such English 
translations became more common as English as- 
serted its right as the national tongue. Even 
after Chaucer (1328 — 1400), forsaking French, as 
the language of a waning class, and lending the 
strength of his genius to the national-^iglish, had 
provided narrative entertainment of a more elabo- 
rate and modern kind in his tales of real life, and 
his romantic stories, borrowed from French, Ital- 
ian, and classical sources — the romance of chiv- 
alry, with its giants, enchantments, tournaments, 
and wonderful adventures of heroic knights, con- 
tinued popular in its prose form. The cycle of 
this Romance of British legend may be considered 
to have been completed in 1485, when Sir Thomas 
Malory's Mort cV Arthur^ or compilation of Ar- 
thurian Romances "oute of certeyn bookes of 
Frensshe," was issued from Caxton's press. 



58 HISTORY OF THE NOVEL. 

Malory's 3Iort d^ Arthur^ or History of King 
Arthur and of the Knights of the Round Tahle^ is 
one of tliose books, the full effect and significance 
of which, in the history of our literature, it would 
require much research and much disquisition to 
exhaust. On the origin of the book alone there 
might be a historical essay of much interest. How 
the oricrinal sjroundwork came forth to the world 
in 1147, in the legends CKf_ Arthur and Merlin, 
which formed part of the Welsh Geoffrey of Mon- 
mouth's Latin " History of the Britons," the mate- 
rials of which he professed to have derived from 
Breton tradition and fi-om Breton writings, of which 
there is no trace ; how Geoffrey's book at once 
seized the imagination of the age, and his legends 
were appropriated, amplified, and developed by 
contemporary metrical chroniclers, and especially 
by the Angio-lSTormans, Gaimar and Wace, and the 
Saxon Layamon ; how, within the next century, 
new tissues of chivalrous and religious romance 
were woven out of the material thus accumulated, 
or attached to it and woven into it, by Anglo- 
Norman poets, themselves not wholly the invent- 
ors of what they wrote, but deriving the incidents 
and the names which they worked up from legend 
already afloat — Robert de Borron adding the 
Roman du St. Graal and the developed History of 
Merlin, and Walter Mapes adding the Adventures 



THE MORT D' ARTHUR. 59 

of Sir Lancelot, the Qiieste clu St. Graal, and the 
Mort d'Arthure, specially so called, and two later 
writers, Lucas de Gast and Helie de Borron, sup- 
I)lying later fragments in the Romances of Sir 
Tristram and other knights ; how the total mass, 
so aggregated, was shaped, adjusted, and again 
morselled out in parts by subsequent minstrels and 
writers in France and in England, gradually loosen- 
ing itself from the restraint of verse, and flowing 
into oral prose ; and how, at length, an unknown 
Sir Thomas Malory, living in the reign of Edward 
IV"., did his service to posterity by recompiling 
the whole in connected English, according to his 
own taste, and perhaps for his own amusement, in 
some castle in the countrj^, or old city-dwelling, 
where he had the French scrolls anclr^lios about 
him, and so j^rovided Caxton with his copy; — here 
is a story of a book which might employ ingenuity 
as well as the story of the Homeric poems, and in 
connection with which there might be discussed 
some of the same problems. It is as if the book 
were the production of no one mind, nor even of 
a score of successive minds, nor even of any one 
place or time, but were a rolling body of British- 
Norman legend, a representative bequest into the 
British air and the air overhanging the English 
Channel, from the collective brain and imagination 
that had tenanted that region through a definite 



60 HISTORY OF THE NOVEL. 

range of vanished centuries. "After that I had 
accomplysshed and fynysshed dyvers hystoryes," 
says Caxton, "as well of contemplacyon as of 
other hystoryal and worldly atites of grete con- 
querours and prynces, and also certeyn bookes of 
ensaumples and doctryne, many nohle and dyvers 
gentylmen of this royame of England camen and 
demaunded me many and oftymes wherefore that 
I have not do make and en^rynte the noble hys- 
torye of the Saynt Greal, and of the most renouned 
crysten kyng, fyrst and chyef of the thre best 
crysteu and worthy, Kyng Arthur, whyche ought 
moost to be remembred emonge us Englysshe men 
tofore al other crysten kynges." Caxton answered 
that one of his reasons was, "that dyvers men 
holde opynyon that there was no suche Arthur, 
and that alle suche bookes as been maad of hym 
ben but fayned and fables, bycause that somme 
cronycles make of hym no mencyon ne remembre 
hym noo thing ne of his knyghtes." The anti- 
quarian arguments used by the gentlemen in reply, 
seem to have but half-convinced Caxton of the 
possibility that Arthur had ever had a real exist- 
ence ; but, on other grounds, he was willing to 
print the book. " For to passe the tyme," he says, 
" this book shal be jilesaunte to rede in, but for to 
gyve fayth and byleve that al is trewe that is con- 
tayned herein, ye be at your lyberte ; but al is 



THE MORT D' ARTHUR. ' 61 

wry ton for our doctryne, and for to beware that 
we falle not to vyce ne synne, but texercyse and 
folowe vertu, by whyclie we may come and atteyne 
to good flime and renomme in thys lyf, and after 
thys shorte and transytorye lyf to come unto ever- 
lastyng blysse in heven." The book fully answers 
to this description. All in it is ideal, elemental, 
perfectly and i^urely imaginative ; and yet rests on 
a basis of what is eternal and general in human 
nature and in man's spiritual and social experience ; 
so that, to use Caxton's very happy enumeration, 
"herein may be seen noble chyvalrye, curtosye, 
humanyte, frendlynesse, hardynesse, love, frend- 
shyp, cowardyse, murdre, hate, vertue, synne." 
We are led over a vague land of plain and hill, 
lake and forest, which we know to be^ritain, and 
which contains towns and fair castles ; over this 
dreamland we pm'sue valiant knights riding in 
quest of adventures, justing with each other when- 
ever they meet, rescuing enchanted maidens, and 
combating with strange shaj^es and horrors ; all 
occurs in a manner and according to laws totally 
out of relation to the real world ; but every now 
and then there is the gleam of some beautiful spot, 
which remains in the mind as a vision forever, the 
flash of some incident conceived in the deepest 
of poetry, the sudden quiver of some etlncal 
meaning; many j^arts, moreover, obviously chal- 
6 



62 HISTORY OF THE NOVEL. 

lenging interpretation as involving intentionally a 
half-expressed pliilosoi3hy ; while the whole may be 
taken, in its cohesion, as an Epic Allegory. It is 
the kind of book into which a poet may go for 
hints and fancies already made to his hands ; in 
dealing with which, by way of elaboration and ex- 
pansion, he may follow his own free will without 
sense of constraint, evolvinf^ meanings where they 
seem concealed, or fitting his own meanings to 
visual imaginations which start out of their appar- 
ent arbitrariness into preestablished connection 
with them. Accordingly, the body of Arthurian 
legend here locked up has served as a magazine of 
ideal subjects and suggestions to some of the 
greatest poets of our nation, from Spenser and 
Milton to our own Tennyson. No wonder that to 
so many in these days Malory's I^ing Arthur has 
become once again a favorite pocket volume. To 
recline in a summer's day, for example, under the 
shelter of a rock on the coast of the Isle of Arran, 
and there, with the solitary grandeurs of the Isle 
behind one, and with the sea rippling to one's feet, 
and stretching in haze towards the opposite main- 
land, to pore over Malory's pages till, in the mood 
of poetic listlessness, the mainland over the haze 
seems again the very region where Arthur ruled 
and the knights journeyed and justed, and the 
romantic island itself an exempt spot on the con- 



TUE 310 RT D' ARTHUR. 63 

temporary margin whither the noise of them was 
wafted — this is reading such as is possible now 
but once or twice in a lifetime, and such as was 
known j)erhaps more when books were scarce. 

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, what 
England possessed of Prose Fiction consisted 
partly of the Arthurian and other romances of 
chivalry, and partly of facetious tales of real life, 
akin to some of those in Chaucer. In this century, 
while the stock of national verse received its most 
important increase in popular ballads and sougs, 
there was a considerable increase also in the stock 
of prose fiction, both by home-made stories of 
English life, and by translations. In the collection 
of Early English Prose Romances^ edited by Mr. 
Tlioms, we have a reprint of ten of these old fav- 
orites of the English fireside — "the Waverley 
Novels," as he calls them, " of the sixteenth cen- 
tury." The first is the legend of Robert the 
Devil, or of the Prince who, having been given 
over to the Devil ere his birth, runs a career of* 
cruelties and crimes unparalleled, till he is miracu- 
lously reclaimed, does penance by living among the 
dogs, and becomes a shining light, and marries the 
Emperor's daughter ; the next is the History of 
Thomas of Reading, or the Six Worthy Yeomen 
of the West, an English social story of the days 
of Henry the First ; next is the Story of Friar 



64 HISTORY OF THE NOVEL. 

Bacon, and his great works as a magician ; then, 
tlie story of Friar Rush, or of a merry Devil who 
gets into a monastery in the disguise of a servant, 
and plays all kinds of j^ranks there ; then, a ver- 
sion of the media3val legend of the i:)oet Yirgil, 
entitled " The Life of Vergilius, and of his Death, 
and the many marvels that he did in his life-time, 
by witchcraft and negromancy, through the help 
of the divells of Hell ; " then, the old tale of 
Kobin Hood, in a brief shape; then, that of 
George-a-Green, the Pinner of Wakefield; then 
"The most pleasant History of Tom-a-Lincoln, 
that renowned soldier, the Red Rose Knight, 
snrnamed the Boast of EnHand: shewinoj his 
honourable victories in foreign countries, with his 
strange fortunes in Faery Land, and how he mar- 
ried the fair Anglitera, daughter to Prester John, 
that renowned monarch of the world ;" after that, 
the history of Helyas, Knight of the Swan ; and 
finally, adapted from the German, the life and 
death of Dr. John Faustus. Of these fictions — 
circulated as chap-books, and some of which have 
done duty as chap-books both in England and 
Scotland to the present day — one or two are re- 
compilations of older matter by persons whose 
names are known, and who were contemporaries 
of Shakspeare. The "History of Thomas of Read- 
ing," for example, is by a Thomas Deloney, a bal- 



CHAP-BOOK ROMANCES. 65 

lad-maker of those days ; and " Tom-a-Lincoln," as 
it stands in the collection, is by a Richard Johnson, 
author of another well-known compilation, « The 
Seven Champions of Christendom." Our "Jack 
tlie Giant-Killer," which is as old, is clearly the last 
modern transmutation of the old British leo-end, 
told in Geoffrey of Monmouth, of Corineus the, 
Trojan, the companion of the Trojan Brutus when 
he first settles in Britain ; which Corineus, beino- a 
very strong man, and particulariy good-humored, 
is satisfied with being King of Cornwall, and kill- 
ing out the aboriginal giants there, leaving to 
Brutus all the i-est of the island, and only stipu- 
lating that, Avhenever there is a peculiarly difficult 
giant in any part of Brutus's dominions, he shall 
be sent for to finish the fellow. 

Wliile the stories thus circulating as chap-books, 
or the originals whence they were derived, were 
not disdained by the dramatists as subjects for 
their plots, additional subjects were furnished in 
abundance by translations from the Italian, the 
French, the Spanish, the Latin, and the Greek, 
executed by persons who made translation their 
business, or by such of the dramatists themselves 
as could practise it occasionally. Among the ear- 
liest important translations in the department of 
pure fiction, I note these : part of Boccaccio, in 
1566, followed by Cintio's Hundred Tales; the 
6* 



66 HISTORY OF THE NOVEL. 

Golden Ass of Apulems, in 1571; the ^thiopics 
of Helioclorus, in 1587 ; Mendoza's Lazarillo de 
Tormes, by David Rowland, in 1586 ; the Diana of 
Montemayor, in 1598 ; Don Quixote, first in 1620 ; 
and Rabelais, by Urquhart, in 1653. These dates 
are suggestive. The influence of foreign prece- 
dents on the forms and the course of our literature 
has hardly been sufficiently studied. The time 
when, in any particular inWmce, that influence 
comes into play, is usually marked, I think, by the 
appearance of the first translation of the work 
which acts as the |)recedent. If so, we should 
gather from the above dates that, while the Novel 
of Adventure and Gallantry, the Pastoral Ro- 
•mance, and the Picaresque Novel, might have 
been naturalized in Britain by the beginning of 
the seventeenth century, and added to the older 
native Romance of Chivalry, the native Fiction 
of English life, and such other native forms of 
fiction as are rej^resented in the chap-books, cer- 
tain other types of fiction already known abroad 
— the Rabelaisian type and the Quixotic type — 
were still in reserve to be naturalized at a later 
day. 

In the sixteenth century, however, England had 
already produced a form of scholarly pi'ose fiction 
for which there has been no exact foreign prece- 
dent. This was the Political Allegory, represented 



EARLY TRANSLATIONS OF NOVELS. G7 

in Sir Thomas More's Utopia. The original Latin 
edition of this celebrated work appeared in 151 G, 
when the author was thirty-six years of age ; and 
the English translation, by Ralph Robinson, was 
published in 1551. In this Romance — under the 
guise of a description of the imaginary island of 
Utopia, given in conversation by one Raphael 
Hythoday, a seafaring man, " well stricken in age, 
with a black, sun-burnt face, a long beard," etc., 
to whom More is supposed to be introduced in the 
city of Antwerp, by his friend Peter ^gidius, or 
Peter Giles — we have a philosophic exposition of 
More's own views respecting the constitution and 
economy of a state, and of his opinions on educa- 
tion, marriage, the military system, and the like. 
Such a style of fiction, once introdtrced, and re- 
quiring only as much or as little of genuine poetic 
fancy as an author might choose to throw into it, 
was likely to be kept up. Accordingly we have 
later examples of it, also originally in Latin, in 
Bacon's Atlantis ; in an odd production of Bishop 
Hall, in his early life, entitled Mundus Alter et 
Idem^ in which (with perhaps more of Rabelaisian 
satire than of political allegory in the design) we 
have verbal descriptions, and even maps, of the 
countries of Crapulia or Feeding-Land, Viraginia 
or Yirago-Land, and other such regions ; and in 
the Argenis of John Barclay. This last work, 



68 HISTORY OF THE NOVEL. 

however, can be claimed for British Uterature only 
in an indirect manner. The author, the son of a 
Scotchman who had emigrated to France in the 
reio-n of James YI., and become a distinguislied 
Professor of Law in a French University, was a 
Frenchman by birth, a Catholic by religion, and 
the son of a French mother. He came over to 
England when young, lived in London, w^rote 
various works, as his father hW done, expounding 
a moderate Catholicism in opposition to the Jes- 
uits, but at length retired to Rome, and there died 
in peace with the Papacy. His Arc/ems, written 
at Rome, was published in 1621, immediately after 
his death. It is an allegoric romance, in which 
the island of Sicily stands for France, and the 
recent civil wars of that country, and its foreign 
relations during them, are philosophically repre- 
sented — Henry IV. figuring as Poliarchus, Calvin 
as Usinulca, the Huguenots as Hyperaphanii, etc. 
Apart from the allegoric undersense, however, the 
romance is praised as a really interesting story, 
rich in incidents, and full of surprises, and yet skil- 
fully conducted; while the Latin, according to 
Coleridge, is " equal to that of Tacitus in energy 
and genuine conciseness, and is as perspicuous as 
that of Livy." Coleridge wishes, but thinks the 
wish almost profane, that the work could have 
made its exit from this beautiful prose Latin, and 



MORE'S UTOPIA, Etc. 69 

been moulded into a heroic poem in English oc- 
tave stanza, or epic blank verse. Instead of being 
known only to a few, it would then, he thinks, 
have been in our popular list of classics. 

Before any of these Latin allegories, except 
More's Utopia.^ had been published, the English 
language had received not only its first sustained 
and scholarly j^i'ose fiction, but also one of the 
earliest specimens of its capacity for refined and 
artistic prose of any kind, in Sir Philip Sidney's 
Arcadia. It was a posthumous publication. Af- 
ter a life of only two and thirty years, one of the 
most heroic and accomplished spirits of a heroic 
and accomplished age — a man whom England 
accounted '^ the rose and expectanciy-^' of her fair 
state, and whom England's queen called lovingly 
" her Philip " — had perished by a chance Avound 
received in a skirmish in the IN'etherlands (1586). 
All that he had left, besides the recollection of his 
qualities, consisted of some writings i^enned before 
his thirtieth year ■ — a few Poems, an Essay in 
Defence of Poesy, and a Prose Romance of con- 
siderable length, but still incomplete. These were 
published after his death — the romance in 1593, 
under the care of his sister, the Countess of Pem- 
broke, and with the title of " The Countess of 
Pembroke's Arcadia," as having begn written for 
her amusement. It is pleasant to think that, 



70 HISTORY OF THE NOVEL. 

though these were but casual emanations from 
Sidney's mincl, and not intended by himself as full 
revelations of it, they show that the contemporary 
opinion of him was not a delusion. The Poems, 
beside Spenser's and others, will not go for much ; 
but they have something of the poetic essence in 
them. The "Defence of Poesy" is one of the 
deepest and nicest little Essays on Poetry known 
to me. Of the Arcadia I wm give a brief ac- 
count. 

The Arcadia is " a piece of prose-poetrie," says 
the writer of a Life of Sidney prefixed to one of 
the early editions of the work ; " for, though it 
observeth not numbers and rhyme, yet the inven- 
tion is wholly spun out of the phansie, but con- 
formable to the possibilitie of truth in all particu- 
lars." This is a just description. The work is 
called a Pastoral Romance, but it would be better 
entitled a Romance Pastoral and Heroic. In the 
opening, we see two shepherds, Strephon and 
Claius, on the sea-shore of a Greek Island, talking, 
with magnanimous mutual esteem, of their com- 
mon love for the beautiful shepherdess Uranin, 
when, lo! cast on the beach near them, by the 
waves, they descry the half-lifeless body of a young 
man. This is Musidorus, who, escaping with his 
friend Pirocl^s from a burning shij), in which they 
were embarked, has managed to swim ashore by 



SWNJiY'S ARCADIA. 71 

the help of a wooden coffer. At his earnest en- 
treaties, the shepherds carry him back in a fisher- 
man's boat to the pLace of the wreck, to look for 
Pirocles. They see Pirocles clinging to the mast 
amid the rich spoils that are floating about ; but, 
before they can reach him, a pirate's galley is on 
the spot, and Pirocles and the spoils are taken on 
board together. Disconsolate at the loss of his 
friend, Musidorus returns ashore with the shep- 
herds, who, after consulting with him, propose to 
carry him to the house of a certain Kalander, a 
bounteous and hospitable gentleman in Arcadia, 
by whose help, they say, if by that of any one, 
Pirocles is likely to be recovered. Tiiey set out 
on their journey to Arcadia, passing through La- 
conia on their way. 

" The third day, in the time that the morning did strew roses 
and violets in the heavenly floor against the coming of the sun, 
the nightingales (striving one with the other which could in 
most dainty variety recount their wrong-caused sorrow) made 
them put off their sleep; and, rising from under a tree, which 
that night had been their pavilion, they went on their journey, 
which by-and-bye Avelcoraed Musidorus 's eyes, wearied Avith the 
vv'astcd soil of Laconia, with delightful prospect. There were 
hills which garnished their proud heights with stately trees; 
humble valleys whose base estate seemed comforted with the 
refreshing of silver rivers ; meadows enamelled with all sorts 



72 HISTORY OF THE NOVEL. 

of eye-pleasing flowers ; thickets which, being lined with most 
pleasant shade, were Avitnessed so too by the cheerful disposi- 
tion of many well-tuned birds ; each pasture stored with sheep 
feeding with sober security, while the pretty lambs with bleat- 
ing orator)^ craved the dam's comfort; here a shepherd-boy 
piping as if he never should be old ; there a young shepherdess 
knitting, and withal singing, and it seemed that her voice com- 
forted her hands to work, and her hands kept time to her voice- 
musick. As for the houses of the <^ntry (for many houses 
came under their eye), they were all scattered, no two being one 
by the other, and yet not so far off as that it barred mutual suc- 
cor, — a show, as it were, of an accompanable solitariness, and 
of a civil wildness. 

" ' I pray you,' said Musidorus, then first unsealing his long 
silent lips, ' what countries be these we pass through, which are 
so diverse in show, — the one wanting no store; the other hav- 
ing no store but of want ? ' 

" ' The country,' answered Claius, ' where you were cast 
ashore, and now are passed through, is Laconia; not so poor 
by the barrenness of the soil, though in itself not passing fer- 
tile, as by a civil war, which being these two years within the 
bowels of that estate between the gentlemen and the peasants 
(by them named Helots), hath in this sort as it were disfigured 
the face of nature, and made it so unhospitable as now j'ou 
have found it, — the towns neither of the one side nor the other 
willingly opening their gates to strangers, nor strangers will- 
ingly entering, for fear of being mistaken. But this country, 
where now you set your foot, is Arcadia; and even hard by is 
the house of Kalander, whither we lead you. The country 



SIDNEY'S ARCADIA. 73 

beinf? thus decked with peace, and the child of peace, good 
husbandry, these houses that you see so scattered are of men 
as we are, that live by the commodity of their sheep, and there- 
fore in the division of the Arcadian estate are termed shep- 
herds — a happy people, wanting little because they desire not 
much.' " 

Arrived at Kalander's house, and received there 
under the assumed name of Palladius, Musidorus 
becomes acquainted with many Arcadians. Thence 
the story expands itself — not confined to Arcadia, 
but ranging over other parts of Greece ; not in- 
volving only shepherds and shepherdesses as the 
characters, or concerning itself only with pastoral 
loves and the other incidents of a shepherd's life, 
but bringing in kings and queens, mingling itself 
with the war between the Lacedsemonians and 
the Helots, and leading to combats in armor, new 
friendships and jealousies, many adventures and 
surprises, lovers' songs, soliloquies, and extremely 
high-flown conversations. 

It would be a mere pretence to say that the 
romance could be read through now by any one 
not absolutely Sydney-smitten in his tastes, or 
that, compared with the books which we do read 
through, it is not intolerably languid. It is even 
deficient in those passages of clear incisive thought 
which we find in the author's Essay on Poetry. 



74 HISTORY OF TRE^^MOVEL. 

ISTo competent person, however, can read any con- 
siderable portion of it without finding it full of fine 
enthusiasm and courtesy, of high sentiment, of the 
breath of a gentle and heroic spirit. There are 
sweet descriptions in it, pictures of i'deal love and 
friendship, dialogues of stately moral rhetoric. In 
the style there is a finish, an attention to artifice, a 
musical arrangement of cadence, and occasionally 
a richness of phrase, for which English Prose at 
that time might well have been grateful. Seeing, 
too, that the complaints of wearisomeness which 
we bring against the book now, were not so likely 
to be made at the time of its publication, when 
readers had not been taught impatience by a sur- 
feit of works of the same class, — seeing, in fact, 
that the book was so popular as to go through 
ten editions in the course of fifty years, — I am dis- 
j)osed to believe that this last merit was not the 
least important. Perhaps, however, some share 
in breaking up the uncouthness of the Elizabethan 
prose, and showing its capabilities in the elegant 
and graceful, ought to be attributed to some of the 
desultory prose fictions of Greene, and of others 
of the pre-Shakspearian dramatists, and especially 
to Lyly's Eupliues (1597). This composition may 
be considered as a romance, inasmuch as it consists 
of conversations and ej^istles strung on a thread of 
fictitious narrative. The " Euphuism " of Lyly ha^v 



SIDNEY'S ARCADIA. 7o 

been parodied by Shakspeare and by Scott; and 
there is no doubt that, as an affectation of the 
EUzabethan age, it was a fair subject for ridicule. 
I believe, however, that the " Euphuism " of Lyly 
was but the exaggeration of a quest after an in- 
crease of dignity and artifice in prose style, which 
we find in all the writers of the age, Sidney and 
Shakspeare included ; and that the Euphuistic pas- 
sion for florid phrases and quaint antitheses did 
our prose some good. 

But the most memorable characteristic of the 
Arcadia is its ideality. It is significant of this, 
that, till the Restoration, the Arcadia of Sidney 
and the poetry of Spenser were always mentioned 
together as kindred productions of English genius. 
The association (allowing for the great superiority 
in degree w^hich is to be accorded to Spenser) is a 
singularly proper one. The two men, the one in 
l^rose and the other in verse, adopted the same 
poetic form, and were ruled by the same poetic 
instincts. Spenser's earlier poetry had been of the 
pastoral kind, — descriptions of ideal scenes of 
Arcadian life, and dialogues of ideal and repre- 
sentative shepherds. Whether this Pastoral form 
of poetry was of Portuguese or of Italian origin, 
or whether it w^as only a reproduction of the an- 
cient Idyl, Spenser made it thoroughly English. 
In his later poetry, and most splendidly in his 



76 HISTORY OF THE NOVEL. 

" Faery Queene," he passed from the Pastoral into 
the Heroic Romance, — throwing his ideal Arcadia 
back into the enchanted and chivalrous eld, cover- 
ing it with thicker forests, planting it with castles, 
and peopling it with knights and ladies, satyrs and 
nymphs, necromancers and shapes of ghastliness. 
With Spenser for his contemporary, Sydney — 
who, as an Italian and Spanish scholar, had be- 
come acquainted with the^foreign Pastoral for 
himself, had read the "Arcadia" of Sannazaro, 
and had translated lyrics from the "Diana" of 
Montemayor — schemed a pastoral romance in 
English prose. It was part of his scheme, how- 
ever, not to make it a pastoral romance merely, 
but to interfuse with the pastoral the higher mat- 
ter of the heroic. Thus, except that he abandoned 
giants and enchantments, and kept his incidents 
within the poetic possibilities of truth, his Arcadia 
was a combination of some of the elements of the 
" Faery Queene " with something of the Spen- 
serian Pastoral. He perfectly knew what he was 
doing. Our wretched modern criticism, not con- 
tent with pointing out the want of human interest 
which must always characterize the Pastoral as 
compared with other forms of poetry, has pre- 
vented us from doing justice to it as an extinct 
form, by filling our minds with an absurd miscon- 
ception of it. The Pastoral, in the hands of such 



SIDNEY'S ARCADIA. 77 

poets as Spenser, was never meant to be a repre- 
sentation of the real life of shepherds, their real 
feelings, or their real language ; it was but the 
voluntary and avowed transferrence of the poet 
himself into a kind of existence which, as being 
one of few and elementary conditions, was therefore 
the best suited for certain varieties of that exer- 
cise of pure phantasy in which the poet delights. 
The shepherds were not shepherds, were never 
meant to be shepherds ; they were imaginary be- 
ings, whom it was convenient, because of their 
ideal nature, to remove away out of the midst of 
actual life into an ideal Arcadia. And so, when 
the heroic was blended with the Arcadian, Sidney, 
as a prose poet, acted deliberately in rejecting the 
historical, and representing men as—tliey never 
were; and he would have smiled with contempt 
at the modern criticism that would have objected 
to him the vagueness of his Arcadia as to time and 
place, the unreality of his shepherds, and the ideal 
perfection of his heroes. For some sixty or sev- 
enty years, Sidney's Arcadia cooperated with 
Spenser's poetry in maintaining a liigh tone of 
ideality in English literature. 

Something of this ideality — or, to give it a neg- 
ative name, this want of direct human interest — 
is to be found in the next work of reputed conse- 
quence in the history of English Prose Fiction, 
7* 



78 HISTORY OF THE NOVEL. 

the Parthenissa of Roger Boyle, and elder brother 
of Robert Boyle, and known, during the Protec- 
torate as Lord Broghill, and, after the Restora- 
tion, as the Earl of Orrery. Partlieiiissa^ which 
was not his only literary attempt, was published, 
in six parts, shortly after the Restoration, and Avas 
collected into one large folio volume in 1676. It 
is a romance after a new fashion, which had come 
into being in France, andv^erhaps in other parts 
of Europe, later than the Pastoral and the Ro- 
mance of Chivalry. Although still ideal in its 
nature, it was ideal after a much more artificial 
style than the older Heroic or Pastoral. Its pe- 
culiarity consisted in this, that the scene was laid 
in the ancient world, and that the characters were 
actual or supposed personages of classical or an- 
cient history, but were made to speak and act like 
high-flown gentlemen and ladies of the seven- 
teenth century. This style of Classic-Heroic fic- 
tion, in which modern ideas of courage, courtesy, 
fidelity in love, and universal human perfection, 
were embodied in stories of ancient Greeks and 
Romans, Egyptians and Babylonians, Phrygians 
and Persians, had obtained immense j^opularity in 
France, in consequence, chiefly, of the achieve- 
ments in it of three nearly contemporary writers 
— Gomberville, Calprenede, and Mademoiselle de 
Scuderi. "Gomberville," says Mr. Hallam, "led 



BOYLE'S PARTHENISSA, Etc. 79 

the way in his Polexanche^ first published in 1632, 
and reaching, in later editions, to about 6,000 
pages." Calprenede's Cassa^if^ra appeared in 1642, 
and his C'/eo/^xriJ^ra was completed in 1646 — both 
enormously prolix. Mademoiselle de Scuderi, after 
beginning in her IbraJmn in 1635, wrote her 
Grand Cyrus and her Clelie^ each in ten volumes. 
As this form of fiction was of French origin, so 
it seemed to suit the French taste better than that 
of any other nation. While it was yet jDopular in 
France, however, the Earl of Orrery seems to 
have made an attempt, in his Parthejiissa, to nat- 
uralize it among his countrymen. " The sun was 
already so far declined," thus the romance opens, 
" that his heat was not oj^pressive, when a stranger, 
richly attired, and proportionately blessed with 
all the gifts of nature and education, alighted at 
the temple of HieraiDolis- in Syria, where the 
Queen of Love had settled an Oracle as famous 
as the Deity to whom it was consecrated." You 
must not suppose that I have gone many pages 
into the Romance beyond this introductory sen- 
tence; but, turning over the leaves of the large 
folio, and swooping down on the text here and 
there, I perceived that there were Romans, Car- 
thaginians, Armenians, and Parthians in it ; and 
that, besides Artabanes the Parthian, who is the 
gentleman that alighted at the temple, and Par- 



80 HISTORY OF THE NOVEL. 

tlienissa, the daughter of a Parthian general, with 
whom that gentleman appeared to be in love, the 
story, somehow or other, brought in Hannibal, Mas- 
sinissa, Mithridates, Spartacus, and other persons 
equally well known in the vicinity of the ancient 
Mediterranean. How they came into the story, or 
what the story is, I cannot tell you ; nor will any 
mortal know, any more than I do, between this and 
doomsday; but there they^^ll are, lively though 
invisible, like carp in a pond. 

Nothing as yet, in British j^rose fiction, save, per- 
haps, old Malory's compilation of the Mort cV Ar- 
thur, and the rough, strongly-seasoned chap-books, 
that could seize the national heart as distinct from 
the fancies of the educated, or imprint itself last- 
ingly on the national memory. But such a work 
was coming. While Boyle's Parthenissa was find- 
ing its leisurely readers, there was living in Bedford 
jail, where he had been confined, with brief inter- 
vals, ever since the Restoration, a tall, strong-boned, 
ruddy-faced, reddish-haired man, already known 
to the justices of that district as John Bunyan, an 
obstinate Baptist preacher. He was compara- 
tively illiterate, — the Bible and Foxe's Martyrs 
were the books he chiefly read ; on his preserved 
copy of the last of which may be still seen margi- 
nal comments in his hand, in ill-spelt doggerel, — 
and he had probably never read a romance in his 



BUNYAN'S PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 81 

life, except, in his unregenerate days, the old chap- 
book of Bevis of Southampton. But he was a 
man of natural genius, with a wit none of the 
weakest, and an imagination about the most fervid 
in England ; and in the events of his previous life 
— his boyhood and youth among English villa- 
gers, his campaign as a soldier in the Parliamen- 
tary army, and, above all, his inward experience 
and his mental agonies and aberrations until he 
had settled in the peace of his Christian belief — 
he had had an education very thorough in its kind, 
if not quite the same as was given at Cambridge 
or Oxford. In Bedford jail he occupied himself 
in preaching to the prisoners ; and, to while away 
what remained of his time, he thought of writing 
a book. What the intended book was he does 
not say, for, before he had gone far in it, he had 
fallen upon another: 

" And thus it was : I, writing? of the way 
And race of saints in this our gospel day, 
Fell suddenly into an Allegory 
Ahout their journey and the way to glory, 
In more than twenty things which I set down. 
This done, I twenty more had in my crown; 
And they began again to multiply. 
Like sparks that from the coals of fire do fly. 

* Nay then,' thought I, ' if that you breed so fast, 
I '11 put you by yourselves, lest you at last 



82 HISTORY OF THE NOVEL. 

Should prove ad infinitum, and eat out 
The book that I alread}^ am about.' " 

And so, out of that old notion of the Christian 
life as a i^ilgrimage, which had existed in hun- 
dreds of minds before until it had become a com- 
monplace, there grew and grew in Bunyan's mind 
the whole visual allegory of his book — from the 
Wicket-gate seen afar oveivjthe fields under the 
Shining Light, on, by the straight, undeviating 
road itself, with all its sights and perils, and 
through the Enchanted Ground and the pleasant 
land of Beulah, to the black and bridgeless river, 
by whose waters is the passage to the glimmering 
realms, and the brightness of the Heavenly City. 

It was after Bunyan's release from prison in 
1672, and when he was over forty-four years of 
age, that the book was finished ; and, when he 
consulted his friends as to printing it, there were 
great differences of opinion. 

" Some said, ' John, print it ; ' others said, ' Not so ! ' 
Some said it might do good; others said 'No.' " 

Those who objected, did so on the ground that 
fiction was an unlawful method of inculcating 
truth, a method already prostituted to the service 
of pleasure and the devil. This matter Bunyan 
discussed for himself. Was not God's own book. 



BUNYAN'S PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 83 

nay his moral government, as shown in the history 
of the Hebrews, full of tyj^es, foreshadows, and 
metaphors; had not Christ and his apostles spoken 
in parables ; and was it not found that eminent 
men of recent times, men " as high as trees " in- 
tellectually, had delivered their doctrines by way 
of allegory and imagined dialogue ? If these last 
had abused the truth, the curse was on them, and 
not on their method. And so, with his strong 
sense, he came to the right conclusion. Nay, he 
knew that his book would last. 

" Wouldcst thou remember, 
From New Year's day to the last of December? 
Then read my fancies. They will stick like burs; 
And may be, to the helpless, comforters." 

The immediate popularity of the book in Eng- 
land, Scotland, and the Puritan colonies of Amer- 
ica, showed that Bunyan had not miscalculated its 
power. By the year 1685, there were ten editions 
of it — coarsely printed, it is true, and on coarse 
paper ; for the poor and the rude discovered its 
merits long before it was customary to speak of it 
as a feat of literary genius. Such of Bunyan's 
more critical contemporaries as did read it, would 
not believe that the untaught Baptist preacher 
was its real author; and he had to write the 



84 HISTORY OF THE NOVEL. 

second part of the Allegory, and his other Alle- 
gory of the Holy War, to convince them. 

Bunyan's JPilgrMs Progress and his Holy War 
are the last English works of prose fiction in which, 
for many a day, we find high poetic ideality. It 
is, indeed, an alleged fact in our literary history, 
that, from the date of the Restoration onwards 
till near the close of the eighteenth century, this 
quality, and certain other qualities associated with 
it, had forsaken the aggregate mind of England. 
In such men as Milton and Bunyan, sons as they 
were of the prior period of Puritan supremacy, 
the quality survived for a time, and that in an 
inordinate degree ; but, when these men died out, 
the nation seemed to enter on a long j^eriod of 
very different intellectual manifestation — an age 
of wit and animal recklessness and keen physical 
research, an age of Whiggism and Toryism, in 
which one had done with " the sublimities," and 
winked when they were talked of It was as if, 
to use a phrenological figure, the national brain of 
Britain had then suffered a sudden contraction in 
the frontal organs of ideality, wonder, and com- 
parison, and in the related coronal region; and, 
retaining perhaps the same force and mass on the 
whole, had balanced the deficiency by a coitc- 
sponding expansion of the occiput, and an increased 
prominence in such special anterior organs as wit, 



3IRS. APHRA BEEN. 85 

number, and weight, and perhaps also causality. 
Henceforward, at all events, high ideality — with 
an exception here and there — takes leave of Brit- 
ish literature. In the department of Poetry, it is 
the age of declamatory maxim and sentiment, of 
fine metrical wit and criticism, of a quick fancy in 
the conventional and artificial. Above all, it was 
the age of the Comic Drama. The name of Dry- 
den, the first and greatest laureate of the period, 
and its living link with the period that had passed, 
suggests at once the prosaic strength that was 
being gained, and the subtle and soaring peculiar- 
ities that were being lost. 

In the Narrative Prose Fiction of the time we 
should expect to find those characteristics (and 
what they are is well known) whicliDryden and 
others imparted to its Dramatic Poetry, And, to 
the extent to which narrative prose fiction was 
practised, such was actually the case. Mrs. Aphra 
Behn, who died in 1689, after having written many 
plays, some poems, and a few short novels, is re- 
membered as a kind of female Wycherley. "As 
love is the most noble and divine passion of the 
soul," writes the warm-blooded little creature, in 
the opening of one of her novels, called The Fair 
Jilt ; or, the Amoitrs of Prince Tarquin and Mi- 
randa, " so it is that to which we justly attribute 
all the real satisfactions of life; and, without it, 
8 



86 HISTORY OF THE NOVEL. 

man is unfinished and unhappy." It is the text of 
all her tales, but with the swiftest possible inter- 
pretation. The tales may have been read by 
Charles II., Dryden, Rochester, Etherege, and 
other wits of the day, to all of whom the fair 
Aphra was personally known ; and they were cer- 
tainly more read in polite circles than Bunyan's 
Pilgrim^ s Progress. But Aphra's place in the 
literature of her day was d^-slight one ; and the 
fact that she alone is now usually named as repre- 
senting the Novel of the Restoration, shows how 
little of the real talent of the time took that par- 
ticular direction. It was not till considerably later, 
when the j^assion for the Comic Drama had some- 
what abated, and when, by the coming of Butch 
William, the moral atmosphere at the centre of 
the nation had been a little cleared, that the Prose 
Fiction shot up into vigor and importance. This 
it did in Swift and Defoe. 



LECTURE II. 

BRITISH NOVELISTS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

SWIFT AJN'D DEFOE — I^^TELLECTUAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE 
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY — PREPONDERANCE OF PROSE IN BRITISH 
LITERATURE DURING THIS CENTURY — THE FICTIONS OF SWIFT 
AND DEFOE NEW PROSE FORMS — SWIFT'S CHARACTERISTICS — 
DEFOE'S CHARACTERISTICS — RICHARDSON, FIELDING, SMOLLETT, 
AND STERNE : THEIR BIOGRAPHICAL RELATIONS SKETCHED — 
RICHARDSON'S METHOD IN HIS NOVELS — HIS MORALITY — HU- 
MOR AND HUMORISTS — FIELDING'S THEORY OF THE NOVEL 
WHICH HE PRACTISED — THE COMIC NOVEL — FIELDING AND 
SMOLLETT COMPARED AND CONTRASTED — BRITISH LIFE A CEN- 
TURY AGO, AS REPRESENTED IN THEIR NOVELS — STERNE'S PE- 
CULIARITIES, MORAL AND LITERARY — JOHNSON'S " RASSELAS," 
GOLDSMITH'S " VICAR OF WAKEFIELD," AND WALPOLE'S "CAS- 
TLE OF OTRANTO" — LATER NOVELS AND NOVELISTS OF THE 
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

The modern British Prose Fiction, as distinct 
from such earher works as came under our notice 
in the last lecture, may be considered to have 
begun in Swift and Defoe. 

It was in 1704, the second year of the reign of 
Queen Anne, that Swift, then in his thirty-eighth 
year, and known as a strange, black-browed Irish 
parson, who had come over to try and connect him- 
self with the Whigs, and so o^^en for himself a 
career out of Ireland, published his Battle of the 



88 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

Boohs and his Tale of a Tab. The publications 
were anonymous, but were traced to their author ; 
and, from that time forward, through the whole of 
the reign of Queen Anne, the whole of that of 
George I., and i:)art of that of George II., Swift — 
alternating between London and Ireland, and, lat- 
terly, no longer a Whig, but a dictator among the 
Tory politicians, who had raised him to the Dean- 
ery of St. Patrick's, Dubli^but did not dare to 
make him a bishop — continued to pour forth con- 
troversial and other tracts, in verse and in prose, 
and to be regarded, even with such men as Pope 
and Addison among his contemporaries, as "the 
greatest genius of the age." Among his slighter 
tracts were several in the same vein of satiric fic- 
tion as the two early productions that have been 
named ; but his only other work of any considera- 
ble length in that vein, was his GidUver's Travels^ 
published in 1727, when he was in his sixty-first 
year. By that time, Defoe, occupying a much 
humbler position among his contemporaries than 
belonged to the imperious Dean of St. Patrick's, 
was also known as a v/riter of prose fiction. 

An eager Whig and Dissenter, the son of a Lon- 
don butcher, and six years older than Swift, Defoe 
had begun his career as a writer of political pam- 
phlets as early as the reign of Charles 11. For 
about thirty-seven years he had gone on writing 



SWIFT AND DEFOE. 89 

such pamphlets on the questions and occurrences 
of the times, sometimes getting thanks for them, 
or even a commissionership or other post from the 
Whigs, but more frequently getting nothing but 
persecution, or coming within the clutches of the 
law for libel ; and, if we except his True Relation 
of the Ajjj^m'itioii of one 3Irs. Veal, which he 
wrote for a publisher, to be prefixed to "Drelin- 
court on Death," and carry off that otherwise un- 
vendible work, it was not till near the close of his 
life, when other means of livelihood, commercial 
and literary, had failed him, that he betook him- 
self to fictitious story-writing. His Mohinson Cru- 
soe appeared in 1719, when he was in his fifty-ninth 
year; and during the twelve remaining years of 
his life, he published, in rapid succession, his Ad- 
ventures of Captain Singleton, his Duncan Camp- 
bell, his Fortunes of Moll Flanders, his History of 
Colonel Jack, his Journal of the Plague, his 3fe- 
moirs of a Cavalier, his Boxanna, or the Fortu- 
nate 3£istress, etc. Besides these, there were some 
twenty other publications of different kinds from 
his busy pen during the same twelve years. Alto- 
gether, the list of Defoe's known writings includes 
two hundred and ten books or pamphlets ; but pos- 
terity has agreed to forget most of these, and to 
remember chiefly some of his works of prose fic- 
tion. 

8* 



90 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

At the close of my last lecture, I called atten- 
tion to the fact that, from the Restoration of 1660 
(perhaps, to clear myself from such exceptions as I 
then indicated, I should have been more safe in 
saying, from the Revolution of 1688), British so- 
ciety, and, with it, British intellectual activity, is 
seen passing into an era of strikingly new condi- 
tions. According to the common feeling, I said, 
Britain then passed into the period in which, to 
all appearance, it had done " with the sublimities." 
Do we not recognize this every day in our com- 
mon historical talk ? Is it not one of our common- 
places that " the Eighteenth Century " — and " the 
Eighteenth Century " must, in this calculation, be 
reckoned from about the year 1688, the year of our 
English Revolution, to about 1789, the year of the 
French Revolution — was, both in Britain, and over 
the rest of the civilized world, a century bereft of 
certain high qualities of heroism, poetry, faith, or 
whatever else we may choose to call it, which we do 
discern in the mind of previous periods, and distin- 
guished chiefly by a critical and mocking spirit in 
literature, a suj^erficial and wide-ranging levity in 
speculation, and a jjerseverance reaching to great- 
ness only in certain tracks of art and of physical sci- 
ence ? Do we not observe that it is in this century 
that there arises and is established, as the paramount 
influence in British thoucrht and British action, that 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CENTURY. 91 

distinction of Wliiggism and Toryism by which 
we still find ourselves polarized into two factions, 
and which, however necessary it may have been, 
and whatever may have been its services in the 
past, is certainly so far from being the most pro- 
fomid distinction possible to the human reason, or 
even visible in human history, that there is not 
now-a-days any noble or really powerful soul in 
these islands but, in his inner heart, spurns it, 
despises it, and throws it off? Do we not ob- 
serve, further, that our historical writers divide 
themselves, as by the operation of a constitutional 
difference, into two sects or schools — the one 
seeking its subjects in the older ages of British 
History, back in the Puritan, or in the Tiidor, or 
even in the feudal or Norman times^as if there 
were little of the highest order of interest in the 
period which has elapsed since the Revolution ; 
the other, with Lord Macaulay at their head, ac- 
tually commencing their researches and their stud- 
ies from the time when the modern distinction 
of Whiggism and Toryism makes its appearance, 
as if all before that were but chaos and barbarism, 
and only then our nation ceased to keep reckoning 
savagely by the stars, and began to voyage regu- 
larly by the loadstone ? 

Here, as in most other such cases, a deeper study 
of the facts might, I believe, provide a reconcilia- 



92 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

tion. Whether this systematic depreciation of the 
Eighteenth Century is just, is a question involving 
perhaps larger speculative considerations than have 
yet been brought into it. If it is supposed that 
those changes of moods which we observe in na- 
tions and even in Humanity in the aggregate, as 
well as in individuals, are caused by additions and 
subductions of the general vital energy with which 
Humanity is charged, — if itSis supposed that now, 
somehow, as if out of celestial extra-planetary space, 
there is shot into the general nerve of the race an 
accession of force, raising its tone and its intensity, 
and that again this accession may be withdrawn, 
leaving the race comparatively languid, — then the 
undervaluing of one age as compared with another 
in our historical retrospections, is not unscientific. 
It is but as saying of an individual man that, at one 
time, what with the excitement of some great 
emergency, he is splendid and transcends himself, 
and that, at anothei-, what with the absence of 
stimulating occasion or with temporary ill-health 
(caused, it may be, by obvious physical or atmos- 
pheric influences), he sinks beneath his usual level. 
As, in the case of an individual, a temporary mal- 
evolence of atmospheric conditions, or of other 
conditions of nature out of himself, may depress 
his mental energy and actually lessen the worth of 
all that he thinks and says while the adverse con- 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CENTURY. 93 

junction lasts, so may there not be cosraical con- 
ditions, conditions of total nature outside of Human- 
ity, tremors telluric, and even blasts sidereal along 
the earth's orbit, or along the mightier path in which 
our whole system is voyaghig, of a kind sometimes 
to cause epidemics which sweep through the life of 
the globe, and seem like admonitions that the globe 
itself might be replunged into the fell pre-Adamite 
state whence it emerged to support man, and, at 
other times, without any such glaring stroke of 
decimation and death, to lead with equal certainty 
to weaknesses and untoward intellectual variations ? 
On the other hand, if we adopt the more general 
notions of Progress, which do not suppose any such 
givings and takings as going on between Humanity 
and the rest of the universe known -ei^ unknown, 
but suppose a definite amount of energy or of pos- 
sibility locked uj) once for all beyond escape in the 
actual organism of Humanity, and subject only to 
evolution, then, as all times are successively parts 
of the self-contained evolution, none is to be depre- 
ciated, and those nearest ourselves least of all. 

I am not going to discuss these alternatives — 
either, on the one hand, to add my voice to the pop- 
ular and now commonplace outcry against the poor 
Eighteenth Century, or, on the other, to fight its 
battle. This only seems, for the present, pertinent 
to my subject, — that, agreeably to the views we 



94 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

took in the former lecture, as to the relative cajDa- 
bilities of Prose and Verse, we should expect to 
find that, to the extent to which we do allow some 
such change to have taken place in British thought 
and British society as that which some would call 
offhand a degeneracy, to the same extent Prose 
would assert its sway in those regions of authorship 
which are peculiarly its own. If the peculiar re- 
gions of Prose — not those into which it may pene- 
trate, or into which, perhaps, it will yet penetrate, 
but those which were first assigned over to it, and 
M'here its rule is least disputed — are the regions of 
the comic, and the historically complex, the didac- 
tic, and the immediately practical, while Verse re- 
tains a certain superior, though not exclusive, mas- 
tery in the realms of the sublime, the elemental or 
ideal, and the highly impassioned — then British so- 
ciety, when it lost, if it did lose, those peculiarities 
of sustained ideality of conception, of faith in things 
metaphysical, and of resoluteness in impassioned 
aims, which had formerly borne it up to the i^oetic 
pitch, and fell into a comparative flat of complicated 
and bustling activity, with Whiggism and Toryism 
regulating the currents, did at least, by that very 
change, present a state of things favorable to the 
increase of Prose Literature as regards relative 
quantity, and also to the use of new and special 
j^rose forms. 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CENTURY. 95 

Do not the facts correspond with the expectation ? 
In the eighteenth century, as we have defined its 
duration, the chief poets or writers of verse in 
Britain are, after Dryden, who links it with the 
time foregoing, — Pope, Prior, Gay, Addison, 
Southerne, Rowe, Hughes, Allan Ramsay, Young, 
Thomson, Dyer, Shenstone, Gray, Collins, Akenside, 
Johnson, Goldsmith, Churchill, Chatterton, Blair, 
Home, Beattie, the two Wartons, and Darwin ; 
names suggestive of very various excellence, but 
not, save in one or two instances, of excellence 
either very extraordinary in degree or in kind pe- 
culiarly poetic. In the list of prose writers for the 
same period, we have the names of Dryden again, 
and Locke, and Clarke, and Berkeley, and Butler, 
and Hartley, and Hume, and Adam Smith; of Bur- 
net, and Atterbury, and Tillotson, and South ; of 
Defoe, and Swift, and Addison again, and Steele, 
and Shaftesbury, and Bolingbroke, and several comic 
dramatists ; of Johnson again, and Goldsmith again ; 
of Richardson, and Fielding, and Smollett, and 
Sterne, and Walpole, and Henry Mackenzie; of 
Hume again, and Gibbon, and Robertson, and Hugh 
Blair, and the younger Warton ; and of others, and 
still others in different departments, not forgetting 
Junius and Burke. Are we not here in the mid- 
dle of a tide of prose unexampled in any former 
time ? That, in older times, there were specimens 



96 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, 

of 23rose perhaps laigiier in some respects than any 
belonging to this era — more majestic, more impas- 
sioned, more poetical — may be admitted, in confor- 
mity with what has been said as to the ultimate 
capabilities of Prose, even in competition with Verse. 
But what wealth here, what variety, what versatil- 
ity ! It is clearly an age in which Prose was, on 
the whole, the more congenial, and in which the 
most important and effecti\^ work of the British 
mind, as the British mind then understood its work, 
devolved on Prose naturally, and was shared in by 
Verse chiefly because Verse had come sorely down 
in the world, had little of its proper work left, and 
undertook anything rather than be idle. Does not 
Gibbon alone outweigh, in real merit, half a score 
of the contemporary versifiers ? And Hume or 
Adam Smith another half-score; and Fielding or 
Burke another ? With the exception of Pope and 
Thomson, and one or two others of the poetic list, 
has not Prose the evident advantage, even in the 
finer and subtler exercises of mind ; and are not 
Addison and Johnson in prose superior to their own 
selves in verse ? In short, accepting, if we choose, 
the opinion that the eighteenth century was a pro- 
saic age, may we not subject the opinion, in accept- 
ing it, to a slight etymological twist, so as to turn it, 
to some extent, into a compliment to the poor shiv- 
ering century of which it is intended as a vilifica- 



SWIFT AND DEFOE. 97 

tion ? May we not, when we next hear the eiglit- 
eenth century in Britain spoken of as a prosaic cen- 
tury, acquiesce in the phrase, with this interpreta- 
tion attached — that it was indeed a prosaic century, 
inasmuch as it produced an unprecedented quantity 
of most excellent and most various Prose ? 

The new British prose fiction which came into 
being near the beginning of the century in the 
w^orks of Swift and Defoe, was one of the most 
notable manifestations of the increasing sufficiency 
of Prose generally. There had been already in 
Britain the Arthurian prose romance, with its won- 
drous ideality, the grotesque and facetious tales 
of the chap-books, the Utopian or political ro- 
mance, the wearisome Arcadian Romance or Pas- 
toral-Heroic, the still more prolix romance of mod- 
ernized classic heroism, the unique romance of 
Bunyan, and also, to some extent, the Novel of 
French and Italian gallantry; but here was a kind 
of fiction which, whatever it might lack in com- 
parison with its predecessors, grasped contempo- 
rary life with a firmer hold at a thousand points 
simultaneously, and arrested more roughly the 
daily forms of human interest. 

Swift, in his fictions, as in the rest of his writ- 
ings, is the Britislr satirist of his age. His proto- 
type, in as far as he* had any, was Rabelais. In 
Swift first the mad^ the obscene, the ghastly, the 
9 



98 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

all but infernal and yet infinitely sorrowful humor 
of the French satirist of the sixteenth century ap- 
pears in full measure in the literature of Brit- 
ain. That he was a reader of Rabelais, cannot 
be doubted. He adopts his style, and the whim- 
sicalities of his method, so openly as almost to 
court the name of his imitator. But it was as a 
man of original genius, who would have gone 
near to be the Rabelais of^is time and country, 
even had no Rabelais been in France before him. 

Indubitably one of the most robust minds of his 
age, Swift, in the first place, went wholly along 
with his age, nay, tore it along with him faster 
than it could decorously go, in its renunciation 
of Romance and all " the sublimities." He, a sur- 
pliced priest (as Rabelais had also been), a com- 
missioned expositor of things not seen, icas an 
expositor of things not seen ; but it was of those 
that are unseen because they have to be dug for 
down in the concealing earth, and not of those 
that fill the upward azure, and tremble by their 
very nature beyond the sphere of vision. The 
age for him was still too full of the cant of older 
beliefs, preserved in the guise of "respectabili- 
ties ; " and, to help to clear it of this, he would fix 
its gaze on its own roots, and on the physical 
roots of hmnan nature in general, down in the 
disgusting and the reputedly bestial. I say this 



SWIFT AND DEFOE. 99 

not in the way of judgment, but of fact. It is 
what we all know of Swift — they who see good 
in his merciless method, as well as they who abhor 
it. But, with all this excess of his age in its own 
spirit, even to what was considered profanity and 
blasphemy, Swift, in many respects, adjusted him- 
self to it. He flung himself, none more energeti- 
cally, into its leading controversy of Whiggism and 
Toryism. He was at first, somewhat anomalously, 
a Whig in civil politics and ecclesiastically a High 
Churchman, consenting to changes in the secular 
system of the State, but zealous for the preserva- 
tion and extension of that apparatus of bishoprics, 
churches, and endowments, which the past had con- 
solidated — though for what end, save that Swifts, 
as well as Cranmers and Lauds, could~^vork it, he 
hardly permits us to infer. Later, he was a Tory 
in state politics as well. In both stages of his 
political career, he took an active interest in cur- 
rent social questions. He was as laborious as a 
23rime minister in his partisanship, as vehement and 
minute in his animosities. He had some peculiar 
tenets which he perseveringly inculcated — among 
wliich was that now called " The Emancipation of 
Women." 

And yet, though he concerned himself in this 
manner with the controversies and social facts of his 
time, how, underneath such concern, we see a ra- 



100 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

ging tumult of thought about humanity as a whole, 
over which all these facts and controversies of his 
time must really have floated as things ludicrous 
and contemptible ! It is one of the peculiarities 
of Swift, that, though belonging to an age in 
which Whiggism and Toryism had come in lieu 
of older distinctions and beliefs, and though him- 
self sharing in the renunciation of these as effete 
fanaticism, yet in him, moreHhan in any other man 
of his time, we see a mind bursting the bounds of 
Whiggism and Toryism, not dwelling in them, see- 
ing round and round them, and familiar in its own 
recesses with more general and more awful con- 
templations. True, Swift's philosophy of human 
nature, in which his partisanship was ingulfed, 
was not the same as that of the elder men — the 
Shakspeares and the Miltons, whose souls had also 
tended to the boundless and the general. It was 
a philosophy of misanthropy rather than of benev- 
olence, of universal despair rather than of hope, of 
the blackness under the earth, and the demons tug- 
ging there at their connections with man, rather 
than of the light and evangelism of the counter- 
vailing Heaven. But herein at least was a source 
of strength which made him terrible among his 
contemporaries. He came among them by day as 
one whose nights were passed in horror ; and 



SWIFT AND DEFOE. 101 

hence in all that he said and did there was a 
vein of ferocious irony. 

While all Swift's fictions reveal his characteristic 
satirical humor, they reveal it in different degrees 
and on different themes and occasions. In some 
of his smaller squibs of a fictitious kind, we see 
him as the direct satirist of a political faction. In 
the Battle of the JBooJcs we have a satire directed 
partly against individuals, j^artly against a prevail- 
ing tone of opinion and criticism. In the Tale of 
a Tub he appears as the satirist of the existing 
Christian Churches, the Papal, the Anglican, and 
the Presbyterian — treating each with the irrev- 
erence of an absolute skeptic in all that churches 
rest upon, but arguing in behalf of the second. 
In the four parts of Gulliver he widensl^he ground. 
In the Voyage to Laputa, etc., we have a satire on 
various classes of men and their occupations ; and 
in the Voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag, and 
still more in the story of the Houynhmns and Ya- 
hoos, we have satires on human nature and human 
society, down to their very foundations. With 
what power, what genius in ludicrous invention, 
these stories are written, no one needs to be re- 
minded. Schoolboys, who read for the story only, 
and know nothing of the satire, read Gulliver with 
delight ; and our literary critics, even while watch- 
ing the allegory and commenting on the philoso- 
9* 



102 NO VELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

phy, break clown in laughter, from the sheer gro- 
tesqiieness of some of the fancies, or are awed 
into pain and discomfort by the ghastly signifi- 
cance of others. Of Swift we may surely say, ' 
that, let our literature last for ages, he will be 
remembered in it, and chiefly for his fictions, as 
one of the greatest and most original of our writ- 
ers — the likest author we have to Rabelais, and 
yet with British difi'erences. In what cases one 
would recommend Swift, is a question of large 
connections. To all strong^ men he is and will 
be congenial, for they can bear to look round 
and round reality on all sides, even on that which 
connects us with the Yahoos. Universality is best. 
In our literature, however, there are varieties of 
spirits — 

Black spirits and white, 
Green spirits and gray ; 



Mingle, mingle, mingle, 
Ye that mingle may. 

If Swift, in his fictions, is the satirist of his age, 
Defoe, in most of his, is its chronicler, or newspaper 
reporter. He had been well beaten about in his 
life, and had been in many occupations — a hosier, 
a tile-maker, a dealer in wool ; he had travelled 



SWIFT AND DEFOE. 103 

abroad and in Scotland ; and he was i:)robably as 
familiar with the middle and lower strata of London 
society as any man living. . He had been in prison 
and in the pillory, and knew the very face of 
the mob and ragamuffinism in its hannts. Hence, 
although he too had been a political pamphleteer, 
and had written with a blnnt, straightforward en- 
ergy, and even with a sarcastic irony, in the cause 
of liberty and Whiggism, yet, when he betook 
himself to concocting stories, the sale of which 
might bring him in more money than he could earn 
as a journalist, he was content to make them plain 
narrations, or little more. In the main, as all know, 
he drew upon his knowledge of low English life, 
framing imaginary histories of thieves, courtesans, 
buccaneers, and the like, of the kind to-suit a coarse, 
popular taste. He was a great reader, and a toler- 
able scholar, and he may have taken the hint of his 
method from the Spanish picaresque Novel, as Swift 
adopted his from Rabelais. On the whole, how- 
ever, it was his own robust sense of reality that led 
him to his style. There is none of the sly humor 
of the foreign picaresque Novel in his representa- 
tions of English ragamuffin life ; there is nothing of 
allegory, poetry, or even of didactic purpose ; all is 
hard, prosaic, and matter-of-fact, as in newspaper 
paragraphs, or the pages of the Newgate Calendar. 
Much of his material, indeed, may have been fur- 



104 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

nished by his recollections of occurrences, or by 
actual reports and registers ; but it is evident that 
no man ever possessed a stronger imagination of 
that kind which, a situation being once conceived, 
teems with circumstances in exact keeping with it. 
When the ghost of Mrs. Veal appears to Mrs. Bar- 
grave, at Canterbury, it is in *' a scoured silk newly 
made up;" and when, after chatting with Mrs. 
Bargrave, and recommendin^^o her Drelincourt's 
Book on Death, the ghost takes her leave of the 
worthy woman, who has been quite unconscious all 
the time of the disembodied nature of her visitor, 
it is at Mrs. Bargrave's door, " in the street, in the 
lace of the beast-market, on a Saturday, being mar- 
ket-day at Canterbury, at three-quarters after one 
in the afternoon." This minuteness of imagined 
circumstance and filling up, this power of fiction in 
facsimile of nature, is Defoe's unfailing character- 
istic. Lord Chatham is said to have taken the His- 
tory of a Cavalier for a true biography ; and the 
AcGOimt of the Plague of London is still read by 
many under a similar delusion. There is no doubt 
that these, as well as the fictions laid more closely 
in the author's own time, are, for the purposes of 
historical instruction, as good as real. It is in the 
true spirit of a realist, also, that Defoe, though he 
is usually plain and prosaic, yet, when the facts 
to be reported are striking or horrible, rises easily 



SWIFT AND DEFOE. 105 

to their level. His description of London during- 
the Plague, leaves an impression of desolation far 
more death-like and dismal than the similar descrip- 
tions in Thucydides, Boccaccio, and Manzoni. It 
is a happy accident, too, that the subject of one of 
his fictions, and that the earliest on a great scale, 
was of a kind in treating which his genius in mat- 
ter of fact necessarily produced the efiect of a 
jDoeni. The conception of a solitary mariner thrown 
on an uninhabited island was one as really belong- 
ing to the fact of that time as those which formed 
the subject of Defoe's less-read fictions of coarse 
English life. Dampier and the Buccaneers were 
roving the South Seas; and there yet remained 
parts of the land-surface of the earth of which man 
had not taken possession, and on which-'SSilors were 
occasionally thrown adrift by the brutality of cap- 
tains. Seizing this text, more especially as offered 
in the story of Alexander Selkirk, Defoe's match- 
less power of inventing circumstantial incidents 
made him more a master even of its poetic caj^a- 
bilities than the rarest poet then living could have 
been ; and now that, all round our globe, there is 
not an unknown island left, we still reserve in our 
mental charts one such island, with the sea breaking 
round it, and we would j^^rt any day with ten of 
the heroes of antiquity rather than with Robinson 
Crusoe and his man Friday. 



106 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: 

Besides Swift and Defoe, there Avere others of 
the literary ckister of Queen Anne's reign, and that 
of George I., who might be inckided among the 
writers of prose fiction. Both Steele and Addison 
have left fine sketches, which, thongh brief, are to 
be referred to this species of literature ; in the Jie- 
onoirs of Martiniis Scrihlerus^ by Pope, Arbuthnot, 
and others, we have a literary satire on a thread of 
fictitious character and incidient; and Arbuthnot's 
History of John Bull is a satirical political fiction 
of the hour, after the manner of Swift. Passing by 
these, however, and also those short novels of licen- 
tious incident, by Mrs. Heywood, and other follow- 
ers of Aphra Behn, which are to be found bound up 
in old volumes, four or five together, in the neg- 
lected shelves of large libraries, we alight, in the 
reign of George II., on a new group of British 
ISTovelists, remembered preeminently under that 
name. When we speak of the British Novelists of 
the Eighteenth Century, we think of Richardson, 
Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, and of the others as 
arranged round them. It is common even, in con- 
sideration of the great extension which the prose 
form of fiction received at their hands, to speak of 
them as the fathers of the present British Novel. 

It was in the year 1740, nine years after Defoe's 
death, and when Swift was lingering on in the 
world as a speechless maniac under the care of his 



RICHARDSON. 107 

friends, that Richardson — a prosperous London 
printer, of a phimp little figure and healthy com- 
plexion, who had lived to the age of fifty-one with- 
out distinguishing himself in any way, except as 
an upright and careful man of business, and a gr^at 
favorite in a circle of ladies who used to visit at his 
house for the pleasure of hearing him talk — pub- 
lished Pamela.) or Virtue Heioarded. He had been 
asked by two of his publishing friends, who knew 
his talent for letter- writing, to write " a little book 
of familiar letters on the useful concerns of common 
life ; " but, on his setting himself to comply with 
the request, it occurred to him, he says, that if he 
wrote a story in an easy and natural manner, " he 
might possibly introduce a new species of writing 
that might possibly turn young people into a course 
of reading different from the pomp and parade of 
romance writing, and, dismissing the improbable 
and marvellous, with which nc^vels generally abound, 
might tend to promote the cause of religion and 
virtue." Remembering to have heard, many years 
before, of a poor girl who, after resisting all the arts 
and persecutions of a rich young squire, was honor- 
ably married to him, and became an exemplary and 
accomplished lady, he framed a story, to the same 
intent, of honest Pamela Andrews resisting through 
ever so many pages the machinations of her young 
master for her ruin, till at last, foiled by her irredu- 



108 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTn CENTURY. 

cible virtue, he is compelled to call in the clergy- 
man, and she is rewarded by becoming his wife, 
riding in the coach drawn by the Flanders mares, 
and being introduced in her blushing beauty to all 
his great relations. The story, though long drawn 
out, according to our present ideas, was an im- 
mense advance, in point of interest, on the drowsy 
romance of the French classic school, and was read 
with avidity in families ; iHi-ile Richardson's claim 
to having invented in it a species of writing " en- 
listing the passions on the side of virtue," was 
allowed by the unanimous voice of the clergy and 
of the strictest morahsts of the time. Among the 
laughing young scapegraces of the day, however, 
the good printer was spoken of irreverently as the 
*' solemn prig," and great fun was made of Pamela, 
her virtue, and its reward. 

No one seems to have burst forth with heartier 
indignation against wl^at, in this particular circle of 
readers, was called Richardson's sickly morality, 
than Harry Fielding, whose sisters were among 
Richardson's visitors and admirers. The son of 
a general, the great-grandson of an earl, and with 
many relatives among the aristocracy of the day. 
Fielding, now in his thirty-fourth year, was a tall, 
handsome, altogether magnificent fellow, with a face 
(if we may judge from his portrait by Hogarth) 
quite kingly in its aspect, and yet the very iraper- 



RICHARDSON AND FIELDING. 109 

sonation of reckless G^oocl-humor and aboundinor 
animal enjoyment. From his twentieth year — 
with the exception of a brief period after his 
marriage, when he lived as a conntry gentleman, 
and ran through a considerable fortune in horses, 
hounds, footmen in yellow liveries, and all kinds 
of extravagant hospitalities — he had lived loosely 
and precariously by his peA in London ; scribbling 
off comedies and farces, editing Whig periodicals, 
smiting political men with lampoons, diving into 
the taverns about Fleet Street, and presiding there 
at roystering companies of actors and wits, and 
demeaning himself, under the annoyance of perpet- 
ual debt and perpetual want of money, with that 
serene indiiference which comes of a happy tem- 
perament and of being the great-graiKbon of an 
earl. He was now a widower, after his first brief 
wedded life ; and he had entered himself at the 
bar, with a view to some sinecure such as Eng- 
land provides for her nominal lawyers. Reading 
Pamela^ this frank and manly humorist would not 
accept it a\ all ; and by way of satire, and at the 
same time to try his hand in the new kind of lit- 
erature of which it was an example, he resolved to 
make it the subject of a parody. He accordingly 
schemed the Adventures of Joseph Andreios — 
Joseph being a footman and the supposed brother 
of Pamela, who, chiefly by keeping the excellent 
10 



110 NO VELS OF THE EIGH TEENTH CENTUM Y. 

pattern of liis sister's virtue before his eyes, is 
" enabled to preserve his purity " m the midst of 
similar temptations. Getting to like the story as 
he proceeded with it, Fielding was by no means 
steady to his original notion of producing a parody 
on Richardson ; and the novel, when published in 
1742, became popular on its own account. 

Encouraged by his success, Fielding published, 
in the following year (1743), another satiric fiction, 
of deeper, if less pleasing irony, in his History of 
the Life of the late Mr, Jonathan Wild, the Great, 
and a volume of miscellanies, containing his little- 
read allegory entitled A Journey from this World 
to the next. He then, for several years, reverted 
to political writings and writings for the stage. 
Richardson also, who resented Fielding's jest at 
his expense, and spoke bitterly to Fielding's own 
sisters of their brother's " continued lowness," had 
j)ublished nothing since the concluding part of his 
Pamela. In 1748, however, came forth Richard- 
son's masterpiece, Clarissa Ilarloice — twice as long 
as its predecessor, and written in the same form, as 
a series of letters, and with the same purpose of 
sustained and serious morality, but so much more 
elaborately wrought, and reaching, at the close, in 
the villany of Lovelace and the irreparable wrongs 
of Clarissa, to such an agony of tragic interest, 
that the criticism even of Fielding and the other 



RICHARDSON, FIELDING, SMOLLETT. Ill 

sons of humor was hushed in admiration of the 
consummate art. The nervous, tea-drinking, pom- 
130US Httle printer, coddled as he was by a bevy of 
admiring women, who nursed his vanity, as John- 
son thought, by keeping him all to themselves, and 
letting nothing but praise come near him, had 
beaten, for the moment, the stalwart Fielding, 
roughing it never so manfully among companions 
of the other sex, and invigorating his views of 
things with club-dinners and claret. The very 
next year, however (1749), Fielding gave to the 
world his masterpiece, in Tom Jones ^ or the His- 
tory of a Foundling ; and so the balance hung 
again between the two men, or rather between 
the two styles. 

At this precise moment a third novelist had come 
into the field. This was Tobias Smollett, a young- 
Scotchman of seven-and-twenty, who, after seeing 
some service in the navy, as a surgeon's mate, had 
settled in London, with his West Indian wife, 
partly in hopes of medical practice^ and partly 
with a view to authorship. He had been pester- 
ing the managers of theatres with a tragedy which 
he had written in Scotland, and had touched and 
retouched till he was tired of it ; he had Avritten 
two metrical satires; he had contributed to peri- 
odicals — all without success, when it occurred to 
him to make an attempt in the new kind of fiction 



112 NO VKLS OF THE EIGII TEENTH CEN TUB Y. 

which Richardson and Fielding were making popu- 
lar. The result was his Adveoitures of Roderick 
Random^ published in 1748, almost simultaneously 
with Clarissa. At first the book was attributed 
to Fielding ; but it was soon known that there was 
a third Richard in the field. 

In 1751 Smollett produced his Peregrine Pickle.^ 
which is twice as long as his first novel, and, in 
my opinion, much superior. In the same year, 
Fielding, who had in the meantime received a small 
pension and the post of a paid police magistrate, 
published his last novel, Amelia. Richardson fol- 
lowed, in 1753, with his Sir Charles Grandison^ in 
which, to correct the partiality with which, as he 
had heard, his fair readers regarded Lovelace, the 
villain of his previous novel, he depicted his ideal 
of a Christian gentleman, such as ladies ought 
preferably to admire. Smollett, in the same year, 
added his third novel. The Adventures of Ferdi- 
nand., Count Fathom. At this point Fielding- 
dropped out of the triumvirate — dying at Lisbon, 
whither he had gone for the benefit of his health, 
in his forty-eighth year. 

The veteran Richardson and young Dr. Smollett 
were now, in public esteem (though Richardson 
would have disdained the association), the surviving 
representatives of the British novel. Neither 
seemed disposed to add anything, in the way of 



RICHARDSON, SMOLLETT, AND STERNE. 113 

fiction, to what be had already produced — Rich- 
ardson, content with his hxurels, and occupying him- 
self in writing letters from his sly seckision to his 
lady correspondents ; and Smollett betaking him- 
self to historical compilations, translations, the edit- 
ing of reviews, and other labors which broke his 
health and tried his irascible tem23er. In the inter- 
val appeared a fourth writer of fiction — the Rev. 
Laurence Sterne, an Irishman by birth, and a York- 
shire clergyman by profession, but with a somewhat 
uhclerical, if not a cracked reputation. In 1759, 
when forty-six years of age, he published the first 
two volumes of his Tristram Shandy^ a work de- 
livered to the public by instalments, and not com- 
pleted, as it stands, till 1767. Richardson, who had 
lived to see the debut of this new interloper, and 
to like him as little as the others, died4ii 1761 ; and 
Smollett and Sterne Avere left together. Smollett's 
fourth novel, his Sir Launcelot Greaves^ published 
in 1762, did little to maintain his reixitation ; and 
to those who judged from Smollett's broken health 
and spirits, it might have seemed that Sterne, though 
the older man, would have the last of it. But it 
was not so. Sterne, having completed his Tristram 
Shandy, and having published also six volumes of 
sermons, was engaged in 1768 in the publication of his 
SentimeiitalJourney (the fi-uit of a continental tour 
which he had made some years before), when he died 
10* 



114 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

in a London inn. Smollett, who had been at death's 
door, but had recovered by a two years' stay abroad 
(liis published account of which was supposed to 
have suggested Sterne's Journey by way of con- 
trast), lived to write two novels more. His Adven- 
tures of an Atom., published in 1769, was, indeed, 
rather a fierce political allegory in the style of 
Swift than a novel ; but in 1771, when he was a 
poor dying invalid at Leghorn, he fl.ashed out again 
in the last, and perhaps the ifest, of all his fictions, 
the Expedition of Humphry Clinlcer. Besides 
being a novel, it is the record of the leal-hearted 
Scot's last visit to his native land. It was written 
while, as his breath grew fainter under the kindly 
Italian sky, all his intervening years of toil and 
trouble faded from his fancy as a dream, and he was 
again a boy, with life bright before him, glorying 
in Wallace and Bruce, walking in the streets of 
Glasgow, fishing by the banks of the Leven, or 
boating on the breast of Lochlomand. When 
Smollett died he was but fifty years of age. 

Of the four writers of fiction, whose historical 
relations to each other I have thus sketched, the 
priority in time belongs to Richardson. With this 
priority of time there go certain attributes distin- 
guishing him conspicuously from the others. 

We do not read Richardson's novels much now ; 
and it cannot be helped that we do not. There 



RICHARDSON. 115 

are the novels of a hundred years between us and 
him ; time is short ; and novels of eight or ten 
volumes, written in the tedious form of letters, and 
recordino: conversations and meditations in which 
the story creeps on inch by inch, without so much 
as an unexpected pistol-shot or a trick of Harlequin 
and Pantaloon to relieve the attention, have little 
chance against the brisker and broader fictions to 
which we have been accustomed. We have to 
remember, however, not only that, a hundred years 
ago, Richardson's novels were read everywhere, 
both in Britain and on the continent, with a pro- 
tracted sense of fascination, a leisurely intensity of 
interest, such as no British author of jDrose stories 
had ever commanded before, but also that almost 
every thoughtful critic who has read Richardson 
since has spoken of him, as all inr'^l, one of the 
masters of our literature. Johnson would not al- 
low Fielding to be put in comparison with Rich- 
ardson; and, whenever Lord Macaulay names 
Richardson, it is as a kind of prose Shakspeare. 

When we read Richardson for ourselves, we can 
see the reasons which have led to so high an opin- 
ion. His style of prose fiction is perhaps more 
original than that of any other novelist we have 
had. I have alluded already to the influence of 
foreign j^recedent on the course of our fictitious 
literature. There was foreign precedent for Sid- 



116 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

iiey's "ArcadiM" in Italian and S|)anish pastoral 
romances ; for Boyle's " Parthenissa" in the French 
classical romances ; for the amatory novelettes of 
the Restoration and tlie subsequent age in French 
and Italian tales ; for Swift's satiric fictions in Ra- 
belais ; and even for some of Defoe's narrations in 
the Spanish jDicaresque novel. In the self-taught 
Bunyan alone have we found a notion of a ro- 
mance not borrowed directly from any precedent ; 
and yet the genius Allegory, to which Bunyan's ro- 
mance belongs, is one which he knew to exist, and 
of w^hich there had been specimens he had never 
heard of To Richardson, more than to Bunyan, 
might be assigned the deliberate invention of a nev/ 
form of literary art, " a new species of writing." 
In this respect it was in his favor that he knew no 
other tongue than his own, that even in English 
literature his reading had been select rather than 
extensive, and that his life had been that of a grave, 
shrewd, and rather retiring citizen, not sopliistica- 
ted in his literary taste by second-hand notions of 
literary method picked up at clubs of wits, or amid 
the effects and clap-traps of theatres. Towards 
the end of his life, his longest journey was from 
his printing-office in Salisbury Court, to his sub- 
urban house at Hammersmith or at Parson's Green ; 
and, in his daily walks in the park or in the streets, 
he was to be seen, according to his own descrip- 



RICHARDSON. 117 



o 



tion sent to a lafly, as a neatly-dressed little fi 
nre, with his left hand in his bosom, and his right 
holding rather than using a cane, "looking directly 
foreright, as passers-by would imagine, but observ- 
ing all that stirred on either hand of him, without 
moving his short neck." When, by a kind of ac- 
cident, he was called upon to task a faculty for con- 
structing stories, for which he had had a reputa- 
tion in his boyhood, but which had lain dormant 
since, this very narrowness of his direct acquaint- 
ance with the conventional life and the casual 
literature of his time, helped him to be inventive 
and original. 

It has been remarked by some one, that the 
knowledge of man is something different from what 
is called knowledge of men, and that writers who 
are strong in the one may be but "moderately pro- 
vided with the other. The remark is not expressed. 
in the best manner ; but it points to a truth. It 
was something to the same effect that Johnson 
had in view when he maintained that Richardson 
painted " characters of nature," whereas Fielding 
painted only "characters of manners." The mean- 
ing is, that a man who is much thrown about in 
society, meets with so many facts, characters, inci- 
dents, physiognomies, and oddities already made 
to his hands, that, if he has but an eye and a mem- 
ory for these, he may take them as they flit before 



118 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

him in their superficial variety, and, by reprodu- 
cing them in certain arrangements and proportions 
in a work of fiction, obtain credit, and not unjustly, 
for representing contemporary life. The process, 
in such a case, is that which Ben Jonson called 
"collecting the humors of men ;" that is, taking up 
actual life in striking flakes and patches from the 
surface of the passing time. But there is another 
process than this, belonging to a higher art of 
fiction. It is when a writer fastens his attention 
on the central mechanism of human nature, selects 
the i^rimary springs and forces of action, and works 
outwards to the medley of external effects through 
the imagined operation of these springs and forces 
in certain collocations, contrasts, and oppositions. 
This is Shakspeare's method ; and its capabilities 
are best seen in him, because he certainly cannot 
be charged with neglecting the hlimors of men, or 
with having a dull eye or recollection for any or- 
der of external facts and ^particulars whatsoever. 
The truth is, in such cases the external facts and 
oddities do strike as vividly and miscellaneously as 
on any man ; but, as they strike, they suggest the 
mechanism which causes them and casts them up, 
and this mechanism is conceived as causing them 
and casting them up, precisely as, by a real mech- 
anician, the motions on the dial-plate of a watch 
are seen as the working of the complex interior. 



RICHARDSON'S METHOD. 119 

The dilFerence between the two methods in result 
is, in reality, the difference between the historical 
and the poetical, the temporary and the perma- 
nent, in art. He who delineates only "characters 
of manners," ceases to interest, except historically, 
when the manners he has delineated have vanished 
from the earth ; but he who delineates "characters 
of nature" — who paints not the avaricious man and 
the vain man peculiar to his own time, and picked 
uj) as ready-made curiosities, ajDparelled in this or 
that manner, but avarice and vanity taking flesh in 
his time — will interest historically also, inasmuch 
as he cannot choose but work in passing fact and 
circumstance, but will grasp the human heart when 
avarice no longer takes the form of tax-farming, 
and when vanity has abandoned hoops and hair- 
powder. — 

While, in Shakspeare's case, the deeper method 
was adopted simply as the method natural to poetic 
genius, it is possible that, in Richardson's, the very 
limitation of his acquaintance with the facts and 
manners of his time may have contributed to tlie 
result. Not having ranged over a wide surface of 
actual life, so as to have accumulated in much 
variety recollections of actual incidents, physiogno- 
mies, scenes, and characters, to be introduced into 
his novels, he was obliged, in constructing his 
stoi'ies, to set out from his experience of human 



120 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

nature in its essential principles (in which experi- 
ence men may be sound and deep without a very 
wide acquaintance at tirst hand with passing man- 
ners), and placing certain imagined characters in 
certain imagined situations, to divine what icould 
take place by their woi-king on together. This 
is, accordingly, what Richardson does. He places 
a girl who is to be his heroine, or a man who is 
to be his hero, in a certain imagined situation, and 
in imaginary relations to other personages — par- 
ents, uncles, aunts, and other ladies and gentle- 
men close to the family group ; he sets these per- 
sons in motion, exhibiting slowly, in letters which 
pass among them, their approximations, recessions, 
and feelings towards each other; from time to 
time he throws in a fresh incident or a new char- 
acter to complicate the history ; and so on he 
creeps to the catastrophe or the consummation. 
His peculiar power consists throughout in the 
subtle imagination of progressive states of feeling 
rather than of changing external scenes ; in the 
minute anatomy of the human heart, as worked 
upon gradually by little alterations of time, place, 
and motive, rather than in the rapid succession 
of external visions and surprises. He adheres to 
liis original group of personages, following them 
hither and thither, when locomotion is necessary, 
from town to country, and from country back to 



EICBARDSON'S METHOD. 121 

town, taking note of such flices as are added to 
the group during these migrations — very minute, 
too, in his descriptions of dress, look, and gesture, 
as far as these personages are concerned, and of 
the houses and gardens in which they move ; but 
bringing in no breadth of contiguous life or land- 
scape ; and, on the Avhole, carrying his characters 
on through the story in a little independent world, 
with which, whatever the tyranny or the misery 
within, surrounding society has slight connections, 
and does not interfere. This disconnection of his 
characters and their history from the surrounding 
medium in which they are supposed to be moving, 
is the main cause of whatever improbability or 
want of truth to fact is charged against Richard- 
son. One feels that a good shrill shriek from the 
heroine at her chamber-window, or "Sir appeal by 
any one in her confidence to the nearest magis- 
trate, or the behavior of any one of the persons 
simply as men or w^omen would behave with the 
British law and the British customs of the eight- 
eenth century in operation round about them, 
w^ould cut the novel short at any point of its -prog- 
ress. Allow Richardson this disconnection, how- 
ever, — let him have his characters as he fancies 
them, isolated as he fancies them, and inter-related 
as he fancies them, — and his art in their govern- 
ment is admirable. He writes on and on, in a plain, 
11 



122 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

full, somewhat wordy style, not always grammati- 
cally perfect ; but every page is a series of minute 
touches, and each touch is from a thorough concep- 
tion of the case which he is representing. In mi- 
nute inquisition into the human heart, and esj^ec- 
ially the female heart, and in the exhibition of con- 
duct as affected from day to day by growing com- 
plications of feeling and circumstance, Eichar.dson 
is a master. So entirely is his plan that of minute 
representation of feeling in its progress, that his 
characters scarcely stand before us at the close 
as impressive creations or individual portraitures. 
We remember his Pamela, his Clarissa, his Love- 
lace, and so on ; but we remember them rather as 
names for certain protracted courses of action or 
suffering, than as beings flashed at once upon the 
imagination in their complete appearance and 
equipments. It is significant of Richardson's gen- 
eral method, that the principal male character of 
his first novel should have no other name, from 
first to last, than that of « Mr. B." What chance 
has such an anonymous gentleman among the 
crow^ds of ideal personages, more distinctly named, 
that readers of novels carry about in their recol- 
lection ? Fielding wickedly availed himself of the 
blank by changing "Mr. B.," in his Joseph An- 
drews., into " Squire Booby." 

A peculiarity of Richardson, advertised by him- 



RICHARDSON'S MORALITY. 123 

self again and again as a radical difference between 
him and most of his predecessors and contempo- 
raries, was that he made all his fictions serve " the 
cause of religion and virtue." This merit, in the 
sense in which he claimed it, can hardly be denied 
to him. He does not shrink from recognizing im- 
morality, its institutions, and its consequences to 
society ; his stories turn out on such recognition ; 
and there are passages in his novels, which, though 
they were read aloud in femilies when they first 
appeared, it would be difiicult to read aloud in 
fiimilies now, inasmuch as the matters to which 
they refer are not esteemed such necessary sub- 
jects of domestic discourse as they once were. 
Honestly, however, and as a really pious and strict 
man, whose tastes, as well as his convictions, were 
in favor of propriety, Richardson did,1ir every Ihie 
that he wrote, endeavor to inculcate the estab- 
lished rules of individual and social ethics, and 
to represent deviations from them as censurable. 
Richardson's ethical teaching has, indeed, been 
spoken of by some of our best authorities as none 
of the highest kind. " I do loathe the cant," says 
Coleridge, " which can recommend Pamela and 
Clarissa Harloice as strictly moral, while Tom 
(Times is prohibited as loose. There is in the 
latter a cheerful, sun-shiny, breezy spirit, that pre- 
vails everywhere, strongly contrasted with the 



124 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

close, hot, day-dreamy continuity of Richardson." 
This is an opinion from a good quarter, and one 
can easily see on what it was founded. In Pa- 
mela^ more especially, the knowingness of the girl 
in the midst of her trials and her virtue, and the 
satisfaction of the author and of herself in the spe- 
cies of reward assigned to her at the last, are not 
calculated according to the most heroic known 
definitions of the moral sejise. " Virtue is the best 
policy," "Plold out, and he may marry you," — 
such, so far as the moral can be expressed sepa- 
rately, is the apparent moral of that novel. Such 
prudential morality, however, may, in the absence 
of what is more elevated, be very good working 
morality in this world ; and, as a serious and mi- 
nute casuist in it, Richardson cannot but do good. 
And, after all, the question in what the moral 
effect of a work of fiction consists, is far more com- 
plex and difficult than may be generally supposed. 
The moral effect of a novel or a poem, or any work 
of the kind, lies not so much in any specific propo- 
sition that can be extracted out of it as its essence, 
and appended to it in the shape of an ethical sum- 
mary, as in the whole power of the work in all its 
parts to stir and instruct the mind, in the entire 
worth of the thoughts which it suggests, and in 
the number and intensity of the impressions which 
it leaves. The addition which it makes to the 



RICHARDSON'S MORALITY. 125 

total mind, the turn or wrench Avhich it gives to 
the mind, the collection of impressive pictures 
which it hangs on the walls of the imagination — 
these are the measures of its value, even morally. 
Of Richardson's novels no one will deny that they 
stir the mind powerfully, or at least pain it keenly, 
as they are read. There are in our language few 
such highly-wrought histories of domestic English 
life ; and no one has written, in i3rose, histories 
of modern domestic incident approaching more 
nearly, in pathetic and tragic effect, to tlie old me- 
trical dramas, in which the themes were taken from 
more ancient and ideal ground. Nor is Richard- 
son's idea of the proper conduct of events in his 
novels, in order to a good effect on the mind, that 
vulgar one which might be thoughtlessly attrib- 
uted to him in virtue of the scheme^f his Pa- 
mela. The moral of his Ckii'issa, for example, is 
not virtue rewarded, but virtue triumphant, even 
in death and infamy. There was something truly 
superior in the firmness with which the old printer 
persisted, in spite of the remonstrances of his lady 
correspondents, in not making that novel end hap- 
pily in the reformation of Lovelace and his mar- 
riage to Clarissa, but tragically — as one for the 
ideal elements of which there could be no terres- 
trial rej3onciiiation. 

A more just objection to Richardson's novels 
11* 



126 NOVELS OF THE EIGETEENTH CENTURY. 

than that on which Coleridge and others insist, — if, 
indeed, their objection does not resolve itself into 
this, — is, the limited portion of the field of human 
circumstance with which they concern themselves. 
They are all, in the main, romances of love and its 
consequences. A hero and a heroine are connected 
by love, on one side, or on both sides, or a hero 
is so connected with two heroines ; and the novel 
is the slow unfolding of tl^ consequences on to an 
approi:)riate termination, l^ow, though this is the 
jDractice, not of Richardson alone, but of the ma- 
jority of modern novelists, and especially of lady 
novelists, it is worthy of consideration that the 
novel is thereby greatly contracted in its capabili- 
ties as a form of literature. Perhaps, however, we 
can well afibrd one eminent novelist, such as Rich- 
ardson, to the exclusive literary service of so im- 
portant an interest. He had qualified himself as 
few have done for the service. In his early boy- 
hood he had been employed by several young 
women to write their love-letters for them ; and so 
he had acquired early insight into the forms and 
intricacies of the tender passion and all its modes 
of strategy. He had been twice married, and had 
had two families of sons and daughters ; and all his 
life long he had been more in the society of women 
than of men, and had had the confidence of. ladies 
of all ages, and of different ranks. He was there- 



HUMOR AND HUMORISTS. 127 

fore a master of love, or, at least, of the feminine 
variety of the passion, in all its minutias ; and when 
he wrote, it was of that of which he had the most 
knowledge. And yet, curiously enough, his own 
notions of the passion which he illustrated so elab- 
orately were all in favor of its abatement or ra- 
tional regulation. He is no friend to elopements, 
or to anything not strictly sensible and reasonable. 
He would have converted Queen Venus herself into 
an intelligent and matronly lady of calm gait and 
aspect ; and he would have clipped the wings of 
Cupid, dressed him perforce in a green tunic with 
gilt buttons, and made him walk behind his moth- 
er as a page carrying the prayer-book. Once, in 
grave jest, he shocked one of his lady correspond- 
ents by arguing that perhaps some of the mischiefs 
and social anomalies caused by unregulated love 
might disappear if society could at any future time 
be arranged on a principle of legalized polygamy. 
The most obvious distinction between Richard- 
son on the one hand, and Fielding, Smollett, and 
Sterne on the other, is, that they belong, all three 
of them, to the class of Humorists, while he does 
not rank naturally in that class. Fielding, Smol- 
lett, and Sterne, as you know, are included by Mr. 
Thackeray in his gallery of the " Humorists of the 
Eighteenth Century ;" but Richardson has no place 
in that gallery. 



128 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

On this distinction, were this the proper place 
for a full discussion of it, much might have to be 
said. The fact on which it rests is simply this, — 
that, while many writers view things seriously, and 
set tliemselves to narrate events, or to enforce doc- 
trines, or to frame imaginary histories, in a spirit of 
straightforward earnestness, there are in every age, 
also, writers who set themselves to the same, or 
to corresponding tasks, with a smile on their faces 
and a sense of fun and iroiiy^ at their hearts ; and 
who, accordingly, either select out of the miscel- 
lany of things such as are confessedly laughable, 
or represent all things so as to bring laughter out 
of them. Stated more deeply, the fact is, that 
anything whatever may be looked at and consid- 
ered in two ways — gravely and seriously, or ironi- 
cally and with reference to something else which 
shall cause it to seem comical; and that some 
minds tend constitutionally to the one mode of 
thought, and others to the other. As to the rela- 
tive worth or power for ultimate good of the two 
modes of thinking, it would be bold for any man 
to pronounce an opinion ofi'hand. One may cer- 
tainly agree with Goethe, when he says that the 
predominance of the humorous spirit in the litera- 
ture of any period is a sign of approaching decrep- 
itude; and I do not know but that at present, 
when comic literature seems to be in the ascen- 



HUMOR AND HUMORISTS. 129 

dency among us, and when even our men of great- 
est talent find it necessary to wear the cap and 
bells, it might be well to bear that observation of 
the German sage in mind. And yet — as none 
knew better than Goethe — a certain proportion of 
humorists among the literary men of any period is 
a sign and requisite of intellectual health ; and the 
very nature of humor is such that a preponderance 
of that quality in any individual may be consistent 
with the finest genius and the greatest speculative 
capacity. Is it not now a commonplace in our 
philosophy of character, that humor, in its high- 
est kind, has its origin beside the very fountain of 
tears, in that sense of things invisible, that per- 
petual reference of the evanescent present to the 
everlasting and inconceivable, which is the one 
invariable constituent of all that w&-eall genius ? 
When we name, too, some of the greatest humor- 
ists, usually so called, that' the world has produced 
— Aristophanes, Horace, Rabelais, Cervantes, Mo- 
liere, Swift, Burns, Jean Paul, Beranger — do we 
not feel that men of this class may be preeminently 
great, and that their function in the thought of the 
world may be, if not always beneficent in appear- 
ance, yet sometimes beautifully so, and always 
really wholesome and corrective ? Were not some 
of them masters of song, also, and sons of mystery 
and sorrow ? And though, in opposition to them, 



130 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

there may be named men more miiformly majestic, 
in whom humor seemed to be as deficient as in 
some of them it was excessive, — men like Dante, 
and Milton, and Schiller, and Wordsv^^orth, — yet 
do we not reserve, even against these examples, as 
something balancing the account, the fact, that in 
others of the topmost and most comprehensive 
men • — in Plato, in Chaucer, in Shakspeare, in 
Goethe, in Scott — humor was present, sometimes 
to the extent of their genius^ On the whole, per- 
haps, what Goethe meant was, that there is a con- 
dition of things in which the humorous spirit in 
literature will reign, by a kind of necessity, as the 
only spirit that can find suitable nutriment ; and 
that such a condition of things, whenever it ap- 
pears, betrays an exhaustion of the social energy. 
Whatever he meant, his saying, I think, has a sig- 
nificance for us now in Britain. Perhaps could we 
wish, in this age of abounding wits and humorists, 
for that which, from its very rarity, would do us 
most good, it would be for the appearance among 
us of a great soul that could not or would not 
laugh at all ; whose every tone and syllable should 
be serious ; and whose face should front the world 
with something of that composed sublimity of look 
which our own Milton wore, when his eyes rolled 
in darkness in quest of suns and systems, or of 
that pitiful and scornful melancholy which art has 



FIELDING'S NOTION OF HIS NOVELS. 131 

fixed for the reprehension of frivolity forever, in 
the white mask of the Italian Dante. 

Whether such a wish would have been as fitting 
a century ago, I will not venture to say. It is 
enough to note that then already for some seventy 
years the humorous spirit had prevailed in British 
literature, and shown itself in forms of composi- 
tion, both in verse and in prose, — but more partic- 
ularly in prose, — which could not but be received 
as important additions to the stock of British au- 
thorship; and that still, under Johnson's literary 
dictatorship, the same spirit of humor was at work, 
urging to the production of new prose forms. The 
most characteristic of these forms was the comic 
prose fiction of Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. 
Of these three writers. Fielding and Smollett go 
together as most nearly akin, leaving-Sterne apart 
as a humorist of distinct character. 

Though Fielding's first' motive towards the style 
of fiction which he introduced was that of ridi- 
culing Richardson, it is very clear, from his pre- 
face to Joseph Aiidreics, that he was aware of the 
novelty of his experiment, and had a distinct the- 
ory of the capabilities of the new form of writing of 
which it was to be an example. In that preface he 
distinctly refers prose fiction of every kind to tlie 
epic order of Poetry, and defines the comic novel 
to be the comic prose epic. " The Epic," he says, 



132 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, 

"as well as the Drama, is divided into Tragedy 
and Comedy. . . And further, as this Poetry may 
be tragic or comic, I will not scruple to say it may 
be likewise either in verse or in prose ; for, though 
it wants one particular which the critic enumerates 
in the constituent parts of an Epic poem, — viz., 
Metre, — yet when any kind of writing contains 
all its other parts, such as Fable, Action, Charac- 
ters, Sentiments, and Dictio^, and is deficient in 
Metre only, it seems, I think, reasonable to refer 
it to the Epic, — at least, as no critic hath thought 
proper to range it under any other head, or to 
assign it a particular name to itself Thus the 
Telemachus of the Archbishop of Cambray ap- 
pears to me of the Epic kind, as well as the 
Odyssey of Homer. . . . Now, a Comic Romance 
is a Comic Epic Poem in prose." He then goes 
on to distinguish between the genuine Comic 
Novel, such as he meant to introduce, and the 
Burlesque, — this last being, as he defines it, a 
caricature of Nature, a representation of things 
monstrous and unnatural, in order to produce 
ludicrous efiect. Without denying the legitimacy 
of such a mode of Art, whether in literature or 
in painting, and stipulating, moreover, that in his 
" diction " he may sometimes avail himself of the 
trick of the burlesque, he yet announces that in 
the true comic fiction, as he conceived it, there 



THE COMIC NOVEL. 133 

must be no caricature in the " sentiments " or the 
"characters," but the closest truth to nature. 
"Perhaps," he says, "there is one reason why a 
comic writer should, of all others, be the least ex- 
cused for deviating from nature, ■ — since it may 
not be always so easy for a serious poet to meet 
with the great and admirable ; but life everywhere 
furnishes an accurate observer with the ridiculous." 
The ridiculous in human life, according to Field- 
ing, is the proper matter for the comic novelist ; 
but, lest this definition should seem too vague, he 
proceeds to say that, in his view, the only source 
of the true ridiculous is affectation ; which, again, 
may exist in one of two forms — that of Vanity, or 
that of Hypocrisy. The multiform exhibitions in 
human society of Affectation arising from Vanity, 
or of Affectation arising from Hypocrisy — these, 
he concludes, and these, alone, supply the comic 
novelist, or writer of the comic prose epic, with his 
legitimate material. 

I do not think that this definition of the objects 
of the Ridiculous is philosophically sufficient. I 
believe that there are materials for the comic in 
nature as well as in human life ; that there may 
be something laughable in the way in which a tree 
bends its branches, or a leaf is blown by the wind, 
or a dog runs to a well ; and, consequently, that 
many things are ludicrous in life, the ludicrousness 
12 



134 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

of which cannot be resolved into vanity, or hypoc- 
risy, or any sort of affectation. In Fielding's own 
novels, I believe, there are exami^les of the ludi- 
crous which would not square with his theory. 
That he should have heralded his first novel, how- 
ever, by a theory so fully reasoned forth, and pro- 
pounded with such an air of critical exactness, 
shows that he wished the public to understand 
that he was consciously initiating a new kind of 
writing. 

Not that he pretended to absolute originality. 
The very title-page of his first novel indicated the 
contrary. It ran thus : " The History of the Ad- 
ventures of Joseph Andrews and his friend Mr. 
Abraham Adams, written in imitation of the man- 
ner of Cervantes, author of Don Quixote." In all 
the subsequent novels of Fielding the influence of 
Cervantes is visible. It is not less visible in the 
novels of Smollett, who, coming in the wake of 
Fielding, may be considered to have accepted, 
w^ithout re-proclaiming, Fielding's already pub- 
lished definition of the Comic Novel, and to have 
offered himself as a second candidate for the honors 
of that style of fiction. One of Smollett's literary 
achievements was a new translation of "Don Quix- 
ote;" and the plot of one of his novels — Sir 
Launcelot Greaves — is that of "Don Quixote," 
slightly changed. But, though Cervantes may be 



FIELDING AND SMOLLETT, 135 

regarded as the acknowledged prototype of both 
Fielding and Smollett, one sees in them also much 
of the influence of an intermediate writer of fiction 
nearer their own age. This- is the Frenchman Le 
Sage (1668—1747), whose Gil Bias and other 
novels — reproductions, in French, by a man of 
original genius, of the spirit and matter of the 
Spanish picaresque novels — were already familiar 
in Britain. Both Fielding and Smollett would 
also have acknowledged their obligations to other 
older humorists and writers of fiction, native and 
foreign. 

To both Fielding and Smollett it may be allowed 
that their novels fulfilled, more completely than 
Richardson's, in respect of the variety of their con- 
tents, that definition of the novel which demands 
that it should, whether serious or "comic, be the 
prose counterpart of the Epic. They are, as re- 
gards superficial extent of matter, more nearly the 
comic prose epics of their time than Richardson's 
are its serious prose epics. In each of them there 
is a love story, threading the incidents together ; 
but to the right and to the left of this story, and 
all along its course, interrupting it, and sometimes 
all but obliterating it, are fragments of miscellane- 
ous British life, or even European life, humorously 
represented. There are varying breadths of land- 
scape ; characters of all kinds come in ; interests 



136 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, 

of all kinds are recognized ; the reader is not jier- 
petually on the rack in watching the feelings of 
the hero and* the heroine, but is entertained with 
continual episodes, rambles, and social allusions. 

Hence, for one thing, the novels of Fielding and 
Smollett are far more amusing, in the popular sense 
of the word, than those of Richardson. If Rich- 
ardson's had been an advance, in point of interest, 
from the tedious romances of a former age, Field- 
ing's and Smollett's must havfe seemed to the read- 
ing public of that day a still greater triumph in 
the art of literary entertainment. It was like jDro- 
viding a capital comedy, or a very rich farce, to 
come after the serious piece of the evening, and to 
begin when, though some of the graver auditors 
might be departing, the theatre was sure to be 
filled to overflowing by the rush at half j)rice. The 
art of prose entertainment has been carried much 
further since those days; but even now, Joseph 
Andrews^ Tom Jones^ Roderick Random^ Pere- 
grine JPicMe^ and Humphry Clinker^ are novels 
nearly as amusing as any we have ; and, if so, what 
must our great-grandfathers have thought of them ? 
In them, for the tirst time, British literature 230S- 
sessed compositions making any approach, in 
breadth, bustle, and variety of interest, to that form 
of literature, always theoretically possible, and of 
which other countries had already had specimens 



FIELDING AND SMOLLETT. 137 

in "Don Quixote" and "Gil Bias," — the comic 
prose epic of contemporary life. All the elements 
of interest pointed out by commonplace critical 
tradition as necessary in the complete epic, were 
here more or less present, in so far as these ele- 
ments could take on the comic hue. There was, 
first, the "fable," more or less amusing in itself. 
Then there were the " characters," all genuine ad- 
ditions in the comic, or serio-comic style, to the 
gallery of ideal portraits bequeathed to the British 
imagination by the creative genius of some former 
writers, and some of them such masterpieces of 
physiognomic skill, as at once to take conspicuous 
places in the gallery, and become favorites both 
with artists and with the public: — from Field- 
ing, his Parson Adams, his Squire Western, his 
Mr. Allworthy, his Philosopher Square^his Parson 
Thwackum, his Partridge, his Amelia, etc.; and 
from Smollett, his Strap, his Tom Bowling, his 
Apothecary Morgan, his Commodore Trunnion, his 
Jack Hatchway, his Tom Pipes, his Matthew Bram- 
ble, his aunt Tabitha and her maid Jenkins, and his 
Scotch Heutenant Lismahago. In the "scenes," 
also, through which these characters were led, — 
country scenes and town scenes, sea scenes and land 
scenes, scenes at home and scenes abroad, tavern 
scenes and prison scenes, scenes in haunts of Lon- 
don debauchery, and scenes in fashionable pump- 
12* 



138 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

rooms and ballrooms, — the reader has certainly 
amusement enough for his money. Then there 
were the " sentiments," as the critics called them 
— the opinions of the authors, brought out by the 
way, and delivered seriously or ironically ; the 
passing strokes of humor and invective ; the dia- 
logues, dissertations, digressions, and short essays, 
on all things and sundry. Lastly, in the matter of 
" diction," so far as that cquld be thought of as a 
separate matter, there was all the general pleasure 
that could be derived from very good writing, by 
authors of practised talent, who had acquired a 
strong, easy manner of their own, distinguishing 
them from other writers, and who could not pen 
many sentences together without some witty turn 
of fancy, or some sharp felicity of phrase. 

And yet, with all this superiority of Fielding 
and Smollett to Richardson, in breadth of epic 
interest after the comic fashion, — the kind of su- 
periority, as I have said, that would attract, and 
justly attract a full theatre, in a very rich and 
broad comedy, presented as after-piece to a seri- 
ous and harrowing drama of domestic incident, — 
one can see on what grounds some critics might 
still prefer Richardson. This might be done, even 
although much store were not set on the greater 
formality of Richardson's ethics, and critics were 
to agree with Coleridge in his opinion, that, not- 



FIELDING AND SMOLLETT. 139 

withstanding the frequent coarseness of the scenes 
and the language in Fielding and Smollett, there is 
more of manly health in their general views of 
things than in those of the jDompous little printer, 
cogitating his histories of virtue in his hot parlor 
at Parson's Green, and reading them bit by bit at 
the tea-table to a circle of listening ladies. 

Such an opinion might be entertained even on 
grounds of biographical knowledge. Fielding, with 
all his faults and all his recklessness, was a manly, 
great-hearted fellow, with more of the right heroic 
blood and true kingly talent in him, though he did 
but occupy a police bench, and live by his wits, 
than was to be found in the Austrian Hapsburgs, 
with whom he counted kin ; and we see Mr. 
Thackeray (as good a judge of character as any 
man), stretching his hand through the interven- 
ing century, and grasping the hand of Fielding, 
as of the man in that time whom he could, on 
the whole, like best. Need we say that Fielding 
would have returned the grasp with interest? 
And so, with a difference, of Smollett. He was 
by no means the idle half-reprobate he represents 
in his Roderick Random. He was often wrong, 
and always irascible, continually fancying himself 
aggrieved, and always with a quarrel on his hands ; 
but he was as proud, warm-hearted, and mettle- 
some a Scot as had then crossed the Tweed — of a 



140 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

spirit SO independent, we are told, that he never 
asked a favor for himself from any great man in 
his life ; paying his way honestly, and helping lib- 
erally those about him who were in distress ; and 
altogether, so far from being a mere pleasure- 
seeker, that there was probably no man then in or 
near London, who staid more at home, or worked 
more incessantly and laboriously, to prevent the 
world from being a shilling the worse for him. 
He ruined his health by ov^work. 

Such being the men, it can hardly be supposed, 
even if we allow for the effects of a lax literary 
conscience, or of a desire to write what would sell, 
that the novels which the men wrote could be 
intrinsically immoral. There are, doubtless, pas- 
sages in them which we should not like to see 
read by " young ladies in white muslin ; " and this 
is a pity. But, if the test of endurable literature 
were that it should always and in every part be fit 
to read, or to be fancied as read, by young ladies 
in white muslin, what a bonfire of books there 
would have to be, and what a sacrifice to the sus- 
ceptibilities of white muslin of tons of literary 
matter, both historical and fictitious, very innocent 
and very instructive for veteran philosophers in 
broadcloth, for medical and moral students, and 
for plain rustics in corduroys ! There may surely 
be '"'' carmina non prius audita'''' which even a 



FIELDING AND SMOLLETT. 141 

^'Musarum sacerdos'''' might think it fit to sing, 
though not " virgmibus puerisqiieP This consid- 
eration, it is true, will not absolve Fielding and 
Smollett from blame, seeing that they knew well 
^nough that girls and boys were likely to be the 
majority of their audience ; and seeing, moreover, 
that in what they addressed to others, one cannot 
always find that they kept themselves strictly up 
to the highest possibilities of the occasion. Still, 
taking all things into account, — the legitimacy in 
literature of much that may not be fit for family 
reading, the difierence of taste in that age as to 
what was fit for family reading, and Richardson's 
own offences in this respect according to the mod- 
ern standard, — it is not on this particular ground 
that the shrewdest admirers of Richardson would 
contend in his favor. They would pather do so, 
I fimcy, on the ground occupied by Johnson on 
the same question, when he argued that Richard- 
son's style of art was the deeper, inasmuch as he 
]Dainted " characters of nature," while Fielding and 
Smollett painted chiefly " characters of manners." 

For my part, I cannot deny that I feel something 
of this difference, though perhaps scarcely to the 
extent in which it was asserted by Johnson. It 
does seem to me that both Fielding and Smol- 
lett — broader as they are than Richardson, more 
rich, more various, more interesting — did work 



1 42 NO VELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUR Y, 

more according to the method of sheer superficial 
observation, and the record of humors presented 
to their hand, and less according to the method 
of ideal development from within outwards. Both 
Fielding and Smollet seem to me to have been^ 
men of true humor, of true heart and genius, who, 
having betaken themselves to story- writing, and 
making it their main object to be popular and 
amusing, did not trouble themselves A^ery severely 
with human nature in its depths and intricacies, 
but seized incidents, characters, and current be- 
liefs, as they were presented in the actual whirl 
of British life of their time, revelling in comic 
plenty of all sorts, rather than caring for ideal 
unity or ultimate truth, and only now and then, 
when they struck out an original character like 
Squire Western or Commodore Trunnion, or w^hen 
by chance they fell upon a vein of feeling constitu- 
tionally strong in themselves, reaching the jooetic, 
the general, the truly elemental. 

It is consistent with what has been just said as to 
the predominance of the historical over the poetic 
method in Fielding and Smollett, that both of 
them make so much use in their novels of the 
device of locomotion. They move their characters 
about, carrying them from inn to inn along coun- 
try roads, from London to the extremities of Brit- 
ain, and back again to London ; and by this means 



FIELDING AND SMOLLETT. 143 

they make a rapid succession of scenes and circum- 
stances pass before the reader's view, without much 
necessity for preserving a connection in the series. 
How many both of Fielding's and of Smollett's 
scenes are laid in the country inns! Now, al- 
though this is one of the old ejDic methods, as in 
the Odyssey, and although in " Don Quixote " the 
same method is followed, and Sixain is brought 
before us as the region of the wanderings of the 
Knight and his attendant Squire, it is yet a method 
likely to be resorted to, in many cases, simply as 
admitting the largest superficial variety of scenes 
and incidents with the least trouble to the thor- 
ough imagination. It is in itself a fine method, 
having certain advantages over the other ; and, 
indeed, where the story is that of the adventures 
of an individual, or of one or two persons, and not 
that of a national enterprise, the natural epic prec- 
edent will be the Odyssey and not the Iliad. No 
fair critic, however, will venture to say that Field- 
ing, and much less that Smollett, has used the 
method with so much of true poetic mastery as 
Cervantes. They lead their heroes about over 
Britain and the Continent, and thus, while nar- 
rating the adventures of these heroes, they make 
physiognomies, events, and objects of all kinds flit 
in profusion before the reader's eyes ; but one sees 
frequently that these are brought in on their own 



144 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

account to add to the general fund of amusement, 
and that they might have been brought in equally 
well had the work been a historical picture of 
British and Continental manners, and not the story 
of the adventures of such imaginary beings as Tom 
Jones and Peregrine Pickle. 

In the very circumstance, however, that the 
novels of Fielding and Smollett contain so much 
that is merely historical d^neation, they have a 
peculiar interest for us now. They are, in many 
respects, more full and vivid accounts of British 
manners in the middle of the eighteenth century 
than are to be found in the professed histories of 
the period. I think all of you will agree with me 
that, if we accept them as true accounts, we would 
rather remain in our own century, with all its 
inconveniences, than go back into such a state of 
things as that over which George II. reigned, and 
George III. for a time, and in which our great- 
grandfathers and great-grandmothers moved and 
had their being. What an unwholesome atmos- 
phere ! what filth, what riot, what social cruelty and 
confusion ! Here is the programme of one of the 
chapters in a novel of Smollett's : 

" I am visited by Freeman, with whom I appear in public 
and am caressed — Am sent for by Lord Quiverwit, whose pres- 
ence I put in a passion — Narcissa is carried off by her brother 



FIELDING AND SMOLLETT. 145 

— I intend to pursue him and am dissuaded by my friend — En- 
gage in play and lose all my money — Set out for London — Try 
my fortune at tlie gaming-table without success — Eeceive a let- 
ter from Narcissa — Bilk my tailor." 



This is a sample of British life a hundred years 
ago, as represented in Smollett's novels. In Field- 
ing the element is not, on the whole, quite so 
coarse; but in him, too, there is so much of the 
same kind of scenery and incident, that we see 
that both novelists were painting life and manners 
as they thought they saw them. As we read, we 
cannot always avoid squeamishness. The highway- 
men, the stupid country justices, the brutality and 
tyranny of men in office, the Draconic state of the 
laws and their foul administration, the_jexecutions, 
the nests of thieves in large towns, — all this we 
can accept in the aggregate as but older forms of 
what we have amongst ourselves; but, when we 
get into a country inn, or into a prison, or into a 
mean London ordinary, and have its worst minutiae 
thrust upon our senses ; or when, as is the case in 
every other page, we see the hero and a few of 
the other personages in some such locality, en- 
gaged in a fight, and shins are kicked and heads 
broken, and the parson has a tub of hog's blood or 
some equally delicious fluid thrown over him by an 
enraged landlady, and caps and underclothing are 
13 



146 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

torn off in the fray, and we hear oaths and certain 
now unutterable anatomical allusions in every sen- 
tence from man or woman, — then our very disgust 
makes us skeptical as to the truth of the represen- 
tation, and we ask ourselves, " Whatever the cen- 
tury, can this have been British life ? " In a cer- 
tain sense, we are obliged to conclude that it was. 
To authorize the conclusion, we have but to com- 
pare Fielding with Smollett, and both with their 
contemporary Hogarth, and all three with others 
of the same time, who have left us reports of ex- 
ternal manners more professedly historical. Nay, 
we have but to recollect what squalor, what hor- 
rors for the ear and the eye, our own generation 
carries in it, — shut down under hatches, it may be, 
but still part and parcel of contemporary reality, — 
to be aware that, if all life now were thrown up 
into literature by spade and mattock on the plan 
of literal representation individually, it might seem 
as if the age of the early Georges was not, after 
all, more uninhabitable by sensitive minds than the 
present ; and as if every age carried about the same 
amount of disagreeable matter in it as every other, 
though with variations, not unimportant, as to the 
manner and the place of stowage. And here oc- 
curs an observation which I think might be largely 
verified. It depends, I believe, very much on the 
style of art in which any age chooses to hand down 



FIELDING AND SMOLLETT. 147 

the tradition of itself, whether that age shall seem 
in after times a delightful one to have lived in. 
Shakspeare, and Ben Jonson were contemporaries ; 
and Shakspeare though he threw his fictions into 
the past, wove them out of his experience of pres- 
ent human nature. I appeal to any reader of the 
two poets whether, if he could belong either to 
Shakspeare's world or to Ben Jonson's, he would 
not at once choose Shakspeare's. Does it not seem 
as if life would have been a much more healthy, a 
much more delightful thing in the one than in the 
other ? — as if to have coexisted with FalstaiF, even, 
and gone about with him in London and Windsor, 
albeit with Pistol swaggering in the company and 
the fire of Bardolph's nose to light one through 
the streets, would have been to live in a more 
genial and enjoyable set of condition'sT^vith greater 
spiritual freedom in one's self, and a finer environ- 
ment of all the human virtues in others, than would 
have been possible if Ben Jonson's social accounts 
of the same age are to be received as more truly 
authentic ? They are authentic ; but they are 
authentic after the historic method of art, which 
takes life in the particular ; and Shakspeare's repre- 
sentations are truer still, more deeply and thor- 
oughly true, because they are after the poetic 
method, which takes life in the general and the 
invariable. And so with the age of the early 



148 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

Georges. If the life of that time, as it is jore- 
sented in the pages of Fielding and Smollett and 
in the pictures of Hogarth, seems -such that we 
would rather remain where -we. are and be our- 
selves at any disadvantage than go back to be 
our great-grandfathers, yet we have other repre- 
sentations of life at the same period, in which, 
simply because they are poetically just, all seems 
happier and sweeter. InasiQuch, however, as we 
have fewer commemorations of that age by it- 
self in the poetical than in the historical style 
of art, may not the inference be to its actual dis- 
advantage? This would be to say that an age 
which has not left ns a sufficiency of jDoetical as 
well as of real representations of itself cannot have 
been fundamentally a genial or beautiful one. Per- 
haps so it is. 

On a comparison of Fielding with Smollett, it is 
easy to point out subordinate differences between 
them. Critics have done this abundantly and 
accurately enough. Smollett, they tell us, is even 
more historical in his method, deals more in actual 
observation and reminiscence, and less in invention 
and combination of reminiscence, than Fielding. 
His notion of a story, still more than Fielding's, 
is that of a traveller, moving over a certain extent 
of ground, and through a succession of places, 
each full of things to be seen, and of odd physiog- 



FIELDING AND SMOLLETT. 149 

nomies to be quizzed. Fielding's construction is 
the more careful and well considered, his evolution 
of his story the more perfect and harmonious, his 
art altogether the more classic and exquisite. His 
humor, too, is the finer and more subtle, like that 
of a well-wrought comedy ; while Smollett's is the 
coarser and more outrageous, like that of a broad 
farce. Both are satirists; but Fielding's satire is 
that of a man of joyous and self-possessed tempera- 
ment, who has come to definite conclusions as to 
what is to be expected in the world, while Smollett 
writes with pain, and under irritation. Fielding 
has little scruple in hanging his villains, as if he 
had made up his mind that the 2:)roper treatment 
of villains was their physical annihilation ; Smol- 
lett, with all his fiercer indignation^unishes his 
villains too, but generally deals with them in the 
end as if they might be curable. If Fielding's, 
on the whole, as Mr. Thackeray and most critics 
argue, is " the greater hand," there are peculiari- 
ties in Smollett in virtue of which Scott and others 
have hesitated to admit his absolute inferiority so 
easily as might be expected, and have ranked him, 
all in all, as Fielding's rival. Some of Smollett's 
characters are as powerful creations as any in 
Fielding; and he has given us a range of sea 
characters in Tom Bowling, Trunnion, Hatchway, 
etc., to which there is nothing similar in the works 
13* 



150 NO VELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUR T. 

of the other. In sheerly ludicrous ej^isode, also, — 
in the accumulation of absurd and grotesque detail 
till the power of laughter can endure no more, — 
Smollett has perhaps surpassed Fielding. There is 
also a rhetorical strength of language in Smollett 
which Fielding rarely exhibits ; a power of melo- 
dramatic effect to which Fielding does not pre- 
tend ; and a greater constitutional tendency to the 
sombre and the terrible. 1!hei'e was potentially 
more of the poet in Smollett than in Fielding; 
and there are passages in his writings approach- 
ing nearer, both in feeling and in rhythm, to lyric 
beauty. Lastly, Smollett possesses one interesting 
peculiarity for readers north of the Tweed, in his 
Scotticism. Had he remained in Scotland, becom- 
ing an Edinburgh lawyer like his cousins, or settling 
in medical practice in Glasgow, the probability is 
that he would still have pursued authorship, and 
have left writings in his own peculiar vein, more 
Scottish in their substance than those that now 
bear his name, and so perhaps linking the infancy 
of N'orth-British literature in Allan Ramsay, with 
its maturity in Burns and Sir Walter. But though 
his fortunes carried him out of Scotland, the Scot 
was always strong in him. In his first novel, it is 
as a young Scot that he starts on the voyage of 
life ; throughout his whole career he looks back 
with affection to the land of his birth, and even 



' STERNE. 151 

figlits her political battles against what he considers 
to be English misconception and prejudice ; and 
his last novel of all, written when he was a linger- 
ing invalid on the Italian coast, is the dying Scotch- 
man's farewell to Scotland. Cm-ioiisly enough, this 
last novel, though the most literally historical of all 
that he wrote, is, in its spirit and matter, the finest 
and mellowest, the most truly classical and poeti- 
cal. Though Roderick Random and Perigrine 
PicMe should cease to be read, Scotchmen would 
still have an interest in preserving Humphry 
Clinker. 

The humor of Sterne is not only very different 
from that of Fielding and Smollett, but is some- 
thing unique in our literature. He also was a pro- 
fessed admirer of Cervantes ; to as large an extent 
as Swift he adopted the whimsical aiMU perpetually 
digressive manner of Rabelais ; aud there is proof 
that he was well acquainted with the works of pre- 
ceding humorists less familiarly known in England. 
But he was himself a humorist by nature — a Brit- 
ish or Irish Yorick, with differences from any of 
those who might have borne that name before him 
after their imaginary Danish prototype ; and, per- 
petually as he reminds us of Rabelais, his Shandean 
vein of wit and fancy is not for a moment to be re- 
garded as a mere variety of Pantagruelism. There 
is scarcely anything more intellectually exquisite 



152 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEli\ ENTURY. 

than the humor of Sterne. To very fastidious 
readers, much of the humor of Fielding or of 
Smollett might come at last to seem but buffoon- 
ery ; but Shakspeare himself, as one fancies, would 
have read Sterne with admiration and pleasure. 

Tristram Shandy and the Sentimental Journey 
were certainly novelties in English prose Avriting. 
The first peculiarity that strikes us in them, con- 
sidered as novels, is the thin style of the fiction, in 
comparison either with that of Fielding or with 
that of Smollett. There is little or no continuous 
story. That special constituent of epic interest 
which arises from the fable or the action, is alto- 
gether discarded, and is even turned into jest ; and 
all is made to depend on what the critics called the 
characters, the sentiments, and the diction. As to 
the characters, who knows not that group of origi- 
nals, Shandy the elder, Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, 
Dr. Slop, the Widow Wadman, etc.? These were 
" characters of nature," and not " characters of 
manners," — creations of a fine fancy working in an 
ideal element, and not mere copies or caricatures of 
individualities actually observed. And how good 
they all are ! what heart as well as oddity there is 
in them! One feels that one could have lived 
cheerfully and freely in the vicinity of Shandy 
Hall ; whereas it is only now and then, among the 
characters of Fielding and Smollett, that this at- 



STERNE. 153 

traction is felt by the reader. Coleridge, who has 
noted as one of Sterne's great merits this faith in 
moral good as exhibited in his favorite characters, 
noted also his j^hysiognomic skill, and his art in 
brinmng^ forward and o'ivins^ sis^nificance to the 
most evanescent minutiae in thought, feeling, look, 
and gesture. In the dissertations, digressions, and 
interspersed whimsicalities of Sterne, we see the 
same art of minute observation displayed; while 
we are j)erpetually entertained and surprised by 
reminiscences from out-of-the-way authors (many 
of them plagiarisms from Burton), by remarks full 
of wit and sense, by subtleties of a metaphysical 
intellect, and by quaint flights of a gay and deli- 
cate, but bold imagination. The "tenderness" of 
Sterne, his power of " pathetic " writing, all his 
readers have confessed ; nor even can the artificial- 
ity of much of his pathos take away the effect on 
oiir sympathies. Sensibility — a capacity for being 
easily moved — was the quality he gave himself 
out as possessing personally in a high degree, and 
as most desirous of representing and diffusing by 
his writings, and he certainly succeeded. So far 
as sensibility can be taught by fiction, his works 
teach it ; and perhaps it was one of his uses at the 
time when he lived, that he had chosen to be the 
apostle of a quality which was otherwise greatly at 
a discount in contemporary literature. Add to all 



154 NO VELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

the exquisite accuracy and finish of Sterne's dic- 
tion. Even now the grace, the insinuating deli- 
cacy, the light lucidity, the diamond-like sparkle of 
Sterne's style make reading him a peculiar literary 
pleasure. One could cull from his pages, and espe- 
cially from his Tristrmn Shandy^ a far greater num- 
ber of i^assages for a book of elegant extracts, than 
from the works of Fielding or Smollett. Several 
such passages are universal i^vorites already. 

Mr. Thackeray, I am aware, has been very severe 
on Sterne, speaking far less of his genius as a 
writer than of his personal character, as seen in 
his life and his letters. I do not know that he is 
a whit more severe than the evidence warrants. 
Sterne's letters, and what is known of his life, do 
give a very disagreeable impression of him, and 
are not calculated to enhance the value of the "sen- 
sibility " which he preaches. Nor is his portrait by 
Reynolds pleasant — fine eyes, but with a lowering 
expression, and the mouth sarcastic and sensual. 
We see him a slender, hectic man, going about in 
his parish, or in London, or on the Continent, a 
prey to moping fits, cherishing all kinds of thrills 
and morbid, nervous ecstasies, and indulging in 
tears as a habitual luxury ; but out of his books we 
do not discern much of heart, or of real kindliness, 
much less of principle. It was Wordsworth, I be- 
lieve, who objected to mixing up the biography of 



STERNE. 155 

a writer with the criticism of his works. If there 
is any instance in which one could wish to agree 
with such a canon, it is certainly that of Sterne. 
BeUeving as I do, however, that we ought not to 
agree with Wordsworth in such a rule, and that the 
deepest literary criticism is that which connects a 
man's writings most profoundly and intimately 
with his personality, conceived comprehensively 
and with central accuracy, I can only hope that, if 
we had the means of investigating Sterne's char- 
acter more largely and exactly, we should find the 
man, after all, as good as his genius. I believe, too, 
that Mr. Thackeray rates the genius of Sterne much 
too low, and that, if the verdict of living readers of 
sufficient culture were taken, or if a list were made 
of eminent writers, even of a thoughtful and serious 
cast, who have admired him, Sterne's proper place 
among our British humorists would seem to be 
much higher than that which Mr. Thackeray has 
assigned to him. What is objectionable in his 
writings is well known, and cannot be palliated. 
That he was a clergyman, makes the offence natu- 
rally greater. " Alas, poor Yoric ! " Had he been 
a layman, like Fielding, more might have been 
pardoned to him, or there might have been less 
requiring pardon ! 

Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, carry 



156 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

US from the middle of the reign of George II. to 
the close of the first decade of that of his succes- 
sor. During the first ten years of the reign of 
George III., and while Smollett and Sterne were 
still alive, the literature of British prose fiction re- 
ceived additions from other pens. Three works of 
this date deserve special notice, as differing in kind 
from any mentioned heretofore, and also from each 
other : — Johnson's Ras^ts^ written in 1759 ; 
Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield^ written in 1761, 
but not published till 1766 ; and Walpole's Castle 
of Otranto^ published in 1764, under the guise of 
a translation from an old Italian romance. Mas- 
selas^ between wdiich and Voltaire's " Candide," 
there is at once an analogy and a contrast, is less a 
novel or tale, than a series of Johnsonian reflec- 
tions, strung on a thread of fictitious narrative. 
" Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of 
fancy," it begins, " and pursue with eagerness the 
phantoms of hope, who expect that age wdll per- 
form the promises of youth, and that the deficien- 
cies of the present day will be supplied by the mor- 
row, attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of 
Abyssinia." And so on the story rolls, poetic and 
gloomy, like a bit of the Black Sea, There could 
not be a greater contrast between this work of the 
ponderous and noble Samuel, and the charming 
prose idyl of dear Irish Goldy. But, what need to 



OTHER NOVELISTS. 157 

speak of the Vicar of Wakefield^ or of the genius 
of its author ? The Castle of Otranto may more 
properly require a word or two. It was " an at- 
tempt," says the author, " to blend the two kinds 
of Romance, the ancient and the modern. In the 
former, all was imagination and improbability ; in 
the latter, nature is always intended to be, and 
sometimes has been, copied with success. Inven- 
tion has not been wanting, but the great resources 
of fancy have been dammed up by a strict adher- 
ence to common life." By way of experiment, in 
reviving the more imaginative style of romance, 
Walpole had bethought himself of a mediaeval 
story of an Italian castle, the human tenants of 
which should act naturally, but should be sur- 
rounded by supernatural circumstances^and agencies 
leading them on to their fate. I confess that on re- 
perusing the story the other day, I did not find my 
nerves affected as they were when I read it first. 
The mysterious knockings and voices, the pictures 
starting fi'om the wainscot, the subterranean vaults, 
and even the great helmet with the nodding black 
plumes in the courtyard, had lost their horror ; and 
Walpole seemed to me a very poor master of the 
Gothic business, or of poetic business of any kind. 
The attempt, however, is interesting as a hark-back 
to medisevalism, at a time when medisevalism was 
but little in fashion. As a virtuoso, Walpole had 

14 



158 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

acquired a certain artificial taste for the Gothic; 
and his "Gothic Story," as he called it, did some- 
thing to bring to the minds of British readers, on 
its first pubHcation, the recollection that there had 
been a time in the world when men lived in castles, 
believed in the devil, and did not take snuff, or 
wear powdered wigs. 

To make the list of the British novelists com- 
plete down to the point w^ch we have agreed in 
this lectul-e to consider as, in literary respects, the 
termination of the eighteenth century, I should 
have to go on and say something of the following 
writers: — Charles Johnstone, the author of the 
Adventures of a Guinea (1760), besides other 
now-forgotten novels ; Henry Mackenzie of Edin- 
burgh, whose 3fan of Feeling^ Mem of the Worlds 
and Jidia de Roid)igne^ were published between 
1770 and 1780 ; Miss Clara Reeve, the authoress of 
the Old English Bctron (1777) ; Miss Fanny Bur- 
ney, afterwards Madame D'Arblay, whose Evelina 
and Cecilia^ the two best of her novels, appeared 
in 1778 and 1782 respectively ; William Beckford, 
the author of the Oriental Romance of Yatheh 
(1784) ; Richard Cumberland, better known as a 
dramatist, whose first venture as a novelist was his 
Arundel in 1789 ; Robert Bage, the Quaker, four 
of whose novels (now little read, but deemed 
worthy of republication by Scott in Ballantyne's 



OTHER NOVELISTS. 159 

Collection of British Novelists) aiDpeared before 
1789 ; and Dr. John Moore, of Glasgow (the father 
of Sir John Moore, the friend and biographer of 
Smollett), whose novel of Zeluco was published in 
1786. But though all these were writers of talent, 
and though some of their novels might deserve 
separate recognition on account of peculiarities 
that might be detected in them, they may all be 
considered — so far, at least, as I am acquainted 
with them — as having adopted the manner of 
some one or other of their recent predecessors. 
Johnstone is represented as a kind of composition 
of Smollett and Le Sage, with a more coarse and 
bitter spirit of satire than is found in either ; Mac- 
kenzie has a general resemblance to Sterne ; Miss 
Reeve's Old English JBaron was a professed imita- 
tion of Walpole's Castle of Otranto; and so with 
the rest. It is not till about or a little after the 
year 1789, that we see a new order of novelists aris- 
ing ; of whom we are to take account in our next 
lecture. Meanwhile, let us bear in mind the fact, 
that the British novel-writing of the eighteenth 
century had done much not only to enrich our 
]3rose literature and to exercise our prose faculty at 
home, but also to increase our reputation and our 
intellectual influence abroad. Till the times of De- 
foe and Richardson, we had been, in the article of 
Novels and Romances, if not in prose literature 



160 NOVELS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

generally, an importing rather than an exporting 
nation ; but our novelists of the eighteenth century 
turned the current the other way, and since then 
we have exported rather than imported. During 
Goethe's youth, all educated persons on the Conti- 
nent were reading our Richardson, our Fielding, 
our Smollett, our Sterne, our Goldsmith. 



LECTURE III, 



SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. 



EDINBCTRGH SEVENTY YEARS AGO — EDINBITKGH SnTCE — ITS IM- 
PORTANT INHABITANTS IN RECENT TIMES — SCOTT PREEMINENTLY 
THE "GENIUS LOCI " — TWO MOST PROMINENT FEATURES OP 
SCOTT'S MIND— HIS LOVE OF THE PAST, OR PASSION FOR HIS- 
TORY — HIS AFFECTION FOR THE PAST, NOT FOR THE WHOLE 
PAST, BUT ONLY FOR THE GOTHIC PORTION OF IT — PATRIOTISM, 
OR SCOTTICISM OF SCOTT — HIS SPECIAL AFFECTION FOR EDIN- 
BURGH — TIME AND MANNER OF HIS DETERMINATION TO THE 
NOVEL — REVIEW OF THE PROGRESS OF BRITISH PROSE FICTION 
IN THE TWENTY-FIVE YEARS PRECEDING " WAVERLEY," OR FROM 
1789 TO 1814 — TWENTY NOVELISTS IMMEDIATELY PRECEDING SCOTT 
— LADY NOVELISTS — NATIONALITY IN NOVELS — REVOLUTION- 
ARY NOVELS: GODWIN— THE GOTHIC ROMANCE SCHOOL: MRS. 
RADCLIFFE — NOVEL OF ENGLISH MANNERS: MISS AUSTEN — 
RELATIONS OF SCOTT TO HIS PREDECESSORS — THE WAVERLEY 
NOVELS CLASSIFIED — SCOTT THE FOUNDER OF THE HISTORICAL 
NOVEL — LIMITS OF HIS HISTORICAL RESEARCH — IS HIS MEDI^- 

; VALISM SOUND?— DEFECT OF SCOTT'S GENIUS — EXCELLENCE OP 
HIS SCOTTISH CHARACTERS — SCOTLAND'S OBLIGATION TO HIM 
-—YOUNG EDINBURGH. 



Edina ! Scotia's darling seat I 
All hail thy palaces and towers ! 

Where once, beneath a monarch's feet, 

Sat Legislation's sovereign powers ! 

14* 



162 SCOTT AND HIS INFL UEN CE. 

From marking wildly-scattered flowers, 
As on the banks of Ayr I strayed, 

And singing lone the lingering hours, 
I shelter in thy honored shade! " 

So sang Burns, with genuine enthusiasm, though 
not in his best Uterary strain, when first, a visitor 
from his native Ayrshire, he sahited the Scottish 
capital. At that time Edinlauj-gh merited the saki- 
tation, even had it been expressed better. The Old 
Town was there as we still see it, or more perfect 
and untouched — the most romantic aggregate of 
natural height and hollow, and of quaint and mas- 
sive building raised thereon by the hand of man, 
that existed within the circuit of Britain ; the ridge 
of the High Street alone, from its crown in the old 
craggy Castle down to its foot in Holyrood Palace 
and Abbey, forming a range of the antique and the 
picturesque in street architecture such as no other 
British city could exhibit. And then, the scenery 
surrounding ! Calton Hill near and ready for its 
monuments ; the Lion of Arthur's Seat grimly 
keeping guard ; the wooded Corstorphines lying 
soft on one side ; the larger Pentlands looming be- 
hind at a greater distance ; down from the main 
ridge, and across the separating chasm, with its 
green and rocky slopes, the beginnings of a new 
city spilt out of the old ; and, over these begin- 



EDINBURGH. 163 

nings, the flats of the Forth, the Forth's own flash- 
ing waters, and, still beyond them, sea and land in 
fading variety to the far horizon — the shores of 
Fife distinctly visible, and, under a passing burst of 
sunlight, the purple peaks of the Highland hills ! 
Sunlight or mist, summer or winter, night or day, 
where was there such another British city ? Then, 
fill this city with its historical associations. Let 
the memories of old Scottish centuries be lodged 
within it, as they were when Burns first saw it, and 
the actual relics of these centuries in their yet un- 
diminished abundance ; let its streets, its alleys, nay 
its individual " lands " and houses be thought of as 
still retaining the legends and traditions, some gro- 
tesque and others ghastly, of the defunct Scottish 
life that had passed through them, amTleft its scars 
on their very wood-work, and its blood-stains and 
wine-stains on their very stones ! All this Burns 
was a man to remember, and to this he makes due 
allusion also in his ode ; 

" With awe-struck thought and pitying tears 

I view that noble, stately dome, 
Where Scotia's kings of other years — 

Famed heroes! — had their royal home. 
Alas! how changed the years to come! 

Their royal name low in the dust! 



164 SCOTT AND ins INFLUENCE. 

Their hapless race wild-wanderino; roam; 
Though rigid laws cries out ' 'twas just! ' " 

But he recognizes also other and more present 
claims in the Edinburgh of his day to his rever- 
ence, and to that of other Scotchmen : 

" Here Justice from her native skies 

High wields her balante and her rod; 
There Learning with his eagle eyes 
Seeks Science in her coy abode " 

Yes ; among the 70,000 souls or thereby who then 
constituted the population of Edinburgh, there 
was a greater proportionate number of men of in- 
tellectual and literary eminence than in any other 
British community, not excepting London. A 
North-British Literature — so to be named as being 
distinct from that general British Literature which 
had London for its centre, and which reckoned 
among its contributors those Scotchmen and Irish- 
men, as well as Enghshmen, who chanced to have 
made London their home — had by this time come 
into existence and established itself. The date 
of the rise of this North-British Literature had 
been the reign of George 11. ; and Edinburgh had 
naturally become its centre, though Glasgow and 
Aberdeen assisted. At the time of Burns's visit, 



EDINBURGH. 165 

tbe Edinburgh stars belonging to this Literature 
were sufficiently numerous. Hume had been ten 
years dead, and some others had also disappeared ; 
but Adam Smith, and Monboddo, and Blair, and 
Robertson, and Tytler, and Henry, and Hailes, and 
Adam Ferguson, and the poets Home and Black- 
lock, and Henry Mackenzie and Harry Erskine, and- 
the chemist Black, and Dugald Stewart, and others 
intermingled with these, formed together a very 
tolerable cluster of Northern Lights. Even as far 
as London their radiance could be seen, when Eng- 
lishmen turned their eyes, which they rarely do, to 
the north ; and, partly in compliment to them, partly 
with reference to the new local architecture, Edin- 
burgh had begun to be called " The Modern Ath- 
ens." The Ayrshire jiloughman caine into the 
midst of these men ; received their praises and ad- 
vices, and took the mea&ure of them severally by 
his own standard ; and went back, little modified, 
apparently, by what he had seen, but full to his 
dying day of a Scotchman's respect for the capital 
of his native land. 

What Burns then felt towards Edinburgh, I be- 
lieve that all educated Scotchmen, or all Scotch- 
men possessing anything of that amor patrim with 
which Scotchmen generally are credited, felt also 
in varying degree. Not an Ayrshire Scot alone, 
but an Aberdeenshire Scot, or a Scot from the 



166 SCOTT AND BIS INFLUENCE. 

west coast, or a Scot from Caithness or the remote 
Orkneys, must have regarded Edinburgh as the 
seat of his country's most memorable traditions, 
the centre of her general life, the pride of her 
common heart. To make a pilgrimage thither, 
was, in those days of difficult travel, a duty of 
love to the distant provincials who had conceived 
the city as yet but from book and from fancy ; and 
to have actually seen Edina's^owers and- palaces, 
was to retain the patriotic vision forever, and to 
blend it with the local and nearer imagery of their 
special homes. Her very dust to them was dear. 

Seventy years have elapsed since then; but is 
it, or needs it be, different now ? No ; a thousand 
times. No ! The Old City is there still, hacked by 
the pickaxe, and scathed by fires, and maltreated, 
perhaps more than was necessary, by so-called im- 
provements, but destined to resist the pickaxe, 
and fires, and improvements, till the picturesque 
ceases from the earth and the Castle has a Russian 
garrison. The Calton Hill has received its mon- 
uments; the Lion of Arthur's Seat still keeps 
guard; the Corstorphines are still softly wooded, 
and the Pentlands loom quiet where they did ; to 
the south there is new beauty of building and of 
gardens over the fields; the great lamp-lit chasm 
under the ridge still separates the new from the 
old; and, when the cannon speaks from beside 



EDINBURGH. 167 

Mons Meg, and the flash flickers to the shores of 
Fife, the reverberation, ere it reaches the Forth, 
rattles the windows of a new city which has 
occupied the space since Burns saw it, and which, 
whatever may be its faults architecturally, forms, 
Avhen looked down upon fi'om the mouth of Meg, 
a sight the like of which I have never seen. We 
have not been doing very much of political or 
national history in Edinburgh these seventy years, 

— there having been an end of that " auld sang" 
at the Union or at the Forty-five; still, even in 
this way, we have added something, civilly and 
ecclesiastically, to the old store of reminiscences. 
Parliament House still stands where it did; we 
can still study the physiognomies of Scotch judges 
on the bench, if not of such origiiials as Kames 
or Esky; and I should like to know where in 
Britain there is such another peripatetic academy 
as that which marches up and down every day 
during term-time, wigged and gowned, in the 
great ante-room of your Law Courts. That sight 
is as good as a Parliament any day, and answers, 
I doubt not, a good many parliamentary purposes. 
But, after all, it is to the social and literary his- 
tory of Edinburgh since Burns came to visit it 

— to the men who, since his time, have been and 
gone, and have mingled their minds with its ac- 
tivity, and left their works and their memories as 



168 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. 

a bequest to its keeping, and as a proof to all the 
world besides what men could live in Edinburgh, 
and have their genius nursed amidst its circum- 
stances, Parliament or no Parliament, — it is to 
this that Edinburgh can point as the true addition 
to its educating influences, and to its associations 
of interest and delight, since the days of Burns. 
That North-British Literature which had then 
begun its course, and taken Edinburgh for its cen- 
tre, has advanced, with no diminished productive- 
ness, during the seventy intervening years. As 
before, Scotland has still spared, and perhaps in 
greater numbers than before, many of her sons 
for the service of general British Literature, as 
organized more especially, and by commercial 
necessity, in London ; but she has retained many 
of them to herself, has found the most j^roper 
footing for a goodly proportion of these in her 
own capital, and in what they have done there 
has had her pleasure and her reward. Among 
the men who have trod the streets of Edinbursjh 
since Burns's days, and who, whether born within 
her precincts or only drawn thither from other 
parts of Scotland, and have spent portions of 
their lives as her familiar citizens, what men there 
have been ! Scott drew his first breath in Edin- 
burgh; here he was living, a fair-haired youth of 
fifteen, when black Burns passed through; and 



EDINBURGH. 169 

here he grew up to be the man that the world was 
to hear of. Jeffrey also was born in Edinburgh, 
and here he lived and died. Chalmers came from 
Anster village, and Glasgow and St. Andrew's 
had him first; but Edinburgh had the honor of 
his old white head, — which, oh, that never I can 
see again ! Wilson, the magnificent, had his 
dwelling here ; here he chanted his j^rose-poetry, 
and shook, so savage, his yellow mane. Hither 
did northern Cromarty send her ScandinaAdan 
Hugh Miller ; he explored your quarries and sea- 
beaches, and was a silent power among you till 
his big heart burst. Lastly, Hamilton is gone — 
the Scottish Stagirite, the metaphysician of recent 
Europe. Others I could name, and others will 
occur to you ; but these are a preeminent few. 

Of the men I have mentioned, no one was so 
thoroughly identified with- Edinburgh as Scott. 
He, if any one, is the true genius loci. It is not 
without significance that in the very centre of the 
city there rises that monument to his memory 
which every eye in Edinburgh is compelled to 
rest on several times every day, whatever other 
object it misses. There his white statue sits, as 
it should, quite in the city's centre. Edinburgh 
is the city of Sir Walter Scott. There are, per- 
haps, those hearing me who remember him as 
he actually walked in these streets, — who have 
15 



170 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUJ^NCE. 

watched his stalwart figure as it limped along on 
the footway before them, or, meeting him with 
a friend, have watched his bushy eyebrows and 
sagacious countenance, and overheard the burr 
of his voice. To me this is but a fancy; but 
even to me so much is the man identified with 
the place, that, as I pass the stationary statue, I 
seem to see the original as he was, and to follow 
him, and him alone, in the^jnoving crowd on the 
other side of Princes Street. That was his walk 
on earth; and there, be sure, his spirit haunts, 
save when he revisits Abbotsford. 

With Scott's birth in Edinburgh, and with his 
education and residence here, the fancy will con- 
nect, and perhaps an actual study of the man's 
life would also in some degree connect, those two 
qualities of his genius to which it owed what was 
most characteristic in its action on the poetry, 
the prose fiction, and the general literature of 
Britain and of Europe, — his veneration for the 
past, and his intense and yet catholic Scotticism. 
I am not here to venture on so extensive a task 
as an analysis of Scott's genius all in all, so as to 
see what he had in common with other men of 
the same literary order, and in what he differed 
from them ; but I think you will agree that, when 
I name these two qualities, — his passion for the 
antique and his Scotticism, — I name the two 



SCOTT AND EDINBURGH. 171 

qualities which stood out so j^rominently in his 
character as to affect all the others and determine 
them in operation. 

Veneration for the past, delight in the antique, 
— this is preeminently the disposition of the His- 
torian. The faculty of the Philosopher is Reason, 
the speculative faculty, which does not neglect the 
phenomena of the past, but works also in the 
present with a view to the future ; the faculty 
of the Poet is Imagination, which need not ex- 
j^atiate in the past, except when it voluntarily 
chooses that particular field as footing for its ideal 
inventions; but the faculty of the Historian is 
Memory, whose very domain is the past. True, 
there are historians of different tyj^es, — some, as 
Herodotus, in whom the love of the j>ast seems 
almost pure and motiveless, a kind of ultimate 
unreasoning feeling, happy - in its own exercise ; 
and others, as Thucydides, in whose narratives 
of past transactions there is more of the critical, 
or philosophical, or practical, or didactic spirit. 
True, also, it may be questioned whether — see- 
ing that an exact and complete knowledge of the 
past, and especially of the distant past, is impos- 
sible, and it is always only the past as perceived 
and shaped by his own spirit, and as represented 
by his own present mode of thinking, that any 
historian can give us — that which is valuable 



172 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. 

and jDermanent in any history, is not more the 
meaning than the materials ; in other words, either 
the jDoetic significance with which the materials 
are invested by a mind seeing them in that haze 
which already generalizes them for the imagina- 
tion and blots out the particular, or the philosophic 
bearing on universal life which the mind can the 
more easily detect in them for a similar reason. 
Still, it remains true tha^the pure love of the 
l^ast — the habit of incessantly remembering, in- 
stead of incessantly imagining or reasoning — is 
the characteristic of the historian as such; and 
that the differences among historians arise in part 
from the varying strength of this characteristic, 
whether it is the poetical tendency or the phil- 
osophical tendency that goes along with it. In 
Scott the degree of this characteristic was enor- 
mous. He blended the poet with the historian, 
and the form of most of his works was poetical 
rather than professedly historical; but he fre- 
quently adopted the historical form, too; and 
there is scarcely a fragment of his poetry that 
has not history for its matter. There were other 
poets of his age, excelling him, some in one 
respect and some in another; but he beat them 
all in the article of history, and in all that the 
passion for history, and a head and heart full of 
history could give to a modern poet. In the 



HIS LOVE OF THE PAST. 173 

sheer delight in the past, and the passion for gath- 
ering its reminiscences, he was as inordinately- 
endowed as Herodotus ; in whom, however, there 
was less of the poet in addition. Herodotus was 
a man, if we may so say, who walked round half 
the margin of the ancient Mediterranean, observ- 
ing its monuments, collecting its legends, and 
painting its manners, so as to condense into one 
book all the wrecks of tradition and of fact which 
time had rolled down, in that the then colonized 
portion of the world, from the beginning of things 
to his own day. Scott was a man who, in virtue 
of a similar constitutional tendency, which he had 
educated from his boyhood, did the same for a lim- 
ited portion of time over a limited portion of the 
much more extensively peopled and much more 
completely organized world of his day — Gothic 
Europe, from the tenth century or thereby onwards. 
This limitation of Scott's love of the antique 
to a particular region geographically and a par- 
ticular era chronologically, is worthy of notice. 
He does not go round and round the world (as 
who could, in that fashion ?) ; his themes are not 
even oriental, except when Gothic adventure, as 
in the crusades, takes him to the East. Gothic 
Europe is his range. Then, again, it is to the cen- 
turies that constitute the Gothic era of European 
history, and, preferably, to the last of these, after 
15* 



174 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. 

the rise of the feudal system out of the earlier 
mediaBval chaos, that he confines his imaginative 
wanderings. He does iiot go back to classical 
times. It is as if, starting from the full light of 
his own days, and going back century after cen- 
tury, — through the eighteenth to the seventeenth, 
and thence to the sixteenth, thence to the fif- 
teenth, and so on, — he had, in all, a range of 
about eight centuries thrbugh which he roamed, 
as in his proper domain, more attached to certain 
portions even of these than to others ; and as if, 
the moment he had penetrated far enough back 
to see the light of the anterior classical ages 
breaking through the gloom, then invariably he 
turned his steps, as feeling that, where there was 
Greek and Roman light, he had no interest in 
going, and he was at home only in the Gothic 
forest. With the exception of a back-reference 
now and then as far as the supposed days of 
King Arthur and of the British Druids, his oldest 
express theme, if I remember aright, is the wars 
of the Moors and the Goths in Spain. Scott's 
veneration for the past, then, was not a venera- 
tion for the whole past, but for the Gothic portion 
of it ; and in this he differed from other men who 
have possessed in strong degree the same general 
affection for history. Niebuhr, for example, de- 
lighted in the classical past; there have been 



HIS LOVE OF THE PAST. 175 

Others whose tastes led them to Hellenic scenes 
and subjects rather than to Gothic and modern; 
and I do not believe that Scott felt half the en- 
thusiasm for Caesar that Shakspeare did. Those 
who have the affection for the past (and most 
poets have had it, more or less) might, indeed, 
be subdivided farther, and in a somewhat inter- 
esting manner, according to the portion of the 
past which is observed most strongly to possess 
their affections. As Scott was preternaturally 
endowed with the affection as regards degree, so 
I believe that the portion of the past on which 
he fastened was as extensive as so strong an affec- 
tion could well apply itself to, and also that it 
was the most imjDortant for all modern purposes. 
Whether he did really understand __the Gothic 
ages over which he roamed ; whether his repre- 
sentations of feudal and mediaeval facts, beliefs, 
costumes, and manners, were really authentic and 
accurate ; or whether, and to what extent, they 
were fictitious makeshifts, which he partly knew 
to be such, — is a question which may be reserved. 
But Scott's veneration for the past reached its 
highest and most shrewd and intelligent form in 
his Scotticism. It is a coincidence, with more 
than the usual amount of verbal good luck in it, 
that his name should have been Scott, — gener- 
ically and comprehensively the Scotchman. In 



176 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. 

all Scotchmen, indeed, even the most philosophic 
and most cosmopolitan that the little land has 
produced, there has been found, it is believed, 
something of this Scotticism — this loving regard 
for the " land of brown heath and shaggy wood," 
and knowledge of its traditions, and sympathy, 
more or less hearty, with its habits, its prejudices, 
and its humors. Part of every Scotchman's outfit 
in life is, or used to be, his Scotticism, however 
much he might choose to disguise it or make light 
of it. N'ay, not a few of the most eminent lit- 
erary Scotchmen before Sir Walter, had exhibited 
their Scotticism openly, ostentatiously, and with 
almost plaguy loudness, and had proclaimed it, 
through good rejDort and through bad report, as 
a conscious element in their genius. So it was, 
as we have seen, with Smollett; and so, in still 
larger proportion, it had been with Burns : 

" Even then a wisli — I mind its power — 
A wish, that to my latest hour 

Shall strongly heave my breast — 
That I for poor auld Scotland's sake. 
Some usefu* plan or beuk could make. 

Or sing a sang at least. 
The rough bur-thistle, spreading wide 

Amang the bearded bear, 
I turned the weeder-clips aside. 

And spared the symbol dear. 



HIS SCOTTICISM. 177 

No nation, no station 

]SIy envy e'er could raise; 
A Scot still, but blot still, 

I knew nae higher praise ! " 

All this feeling Scott, too, had from his child- 
hood ; and in his earliest readings in his boyhood 
and youth he had nursed and fostered it, — still 
turning and returning f>oni his miscellaneous 
readings in the universal literature of European 
romance and history back with especial fondness 
to the legends and the history of his native land. 
Moreover, inasmuch as he was a native of Edin- 
burgh, it might be possible to show that his Scot- 
ticism was necessarily of a more central, and, as 
we may say, more metroj^olitan kind than the 
Scotticism of either Smollett or Burns. In his 
early familiarity with Edinburgh, both physically 
and socially, and in his wanderings about its en- 
virons, he had acquired, in wonderfully strong 
degree, that affection for it, that actual magnetic 
or nervous connection with it, which we have 
already described. Who does not remember the 
burst in " Marmion»" when Edinburgh is seen from 
the Braids? 

" Still on the spot Lord Marmion stayed, 
For fairer scene he ne'er surveyed. 



178 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. 

When sated with the marshal show- 
That peopled all the plain below. 
The wandering eye could o'er it go. 
And mark the distant city glow. 

With gloomy splendor red; 
For on the smoke-wreaths, huge and slow. 
That round the sable turrets flow, 
The morning beams were shed, 
And tinged them witW lustre proud. 
Like that which streaks a thunder-cloud. 

Such dusky grandeur clothed the height 

Where the huge castle holds its state. 
And all the steep slope adoAvn, 

Whose ridgy bade heaves to the sky. 

Piled deep and massy, close and high. 
Mine owti romantic town." 

But even in this outburst dedicated, to his "own 
romantic town," his fancy passes instinctively to 
the whole land of which it is the capitaL He 
makes Marmion and his companions glance be- 
yond the city, far north to the Ochil mountains, 
to Fife and the Firth, to Preston-Bay and Ber- 
wick-Law ; and then, in the next line, this limited 
scene stands as a representation of all Scotland : 

" Fitz-Eustace' heart felt closely pent; 
As if to give his rapture vent, 



HIS SCOTTICISM. 179 

The spur he to his charger lent. 

And raised his bridle hand; 
And, making demivolte in air, 
Cried, ' Where 's the coward that would not dare 

To fight for such a land! ' " 

As this general regard for all Scotland might 
"be expected more particularly of a metropolitan 
Scot, so the poet had increased and cultivated it 
by his more than usual amount of travel and resi- 
dence in those days in diJfferent parts of Scotland. 
Tweedside and the Border were soon familiar to 
him, and dear to him as the region of his ances- 
tors; he knew the West; he had gone far up 
the east coast, and ultimately he got as far as 
the Orkneys ; and, at a time when tbe~~Highlands 
were much less pervious than they now are to 
Lowland tourists, he had lived in them for months 
together, surrounded by tartan and Gaelic, and 
yet quite at home. It was not only with the 
scenery of his country that he was acquainted. 
Being himself one of the shrewdest, most kindly, 
and most sociable of men, and " having had from 
his infancy," as he says, "free and unrestrained 
communication with all ranks of his countrymen, 
from the Scottish peer to the Scottish plough- 
man," he knew their ways, their dialect, their 
modes of thought, their humors, as intimately as 



380 SCOTT AND HIS I NFL UENCE. 

any Scotchman breathing. His profession as a 
lawyer, and his official position as a sheriff, added 
even a technical knowledge of Scottish institu- 
tions ; and the age in which he lived was one in 
which it was possible for a retentive memory, like 
his, to store up reports and relics at first hand 
of a wilder state of Scottish society which had 
passed away — recollections, both Highland and 
Lowland, reaching back to^the Jacobite Rebel- 
lions, and even farther. All in all, his Scotticism 
was full, extensive, and thorough. In combina- 
tion with his love of the past, it took, for the 
ordinary purposes of public citizenship, the form 
of Scottish Toryism; but in the larger field of 
literature its outcome was such as to thrill and 
please the world. 

As all know, it was not till Scott's mature life, 
and when he had already long been known as one 
of the first British poets and miscellaneous prose 
writers of his time, that he turned into the track 
of prose fiction. From 1796 to 1805, or from his 
twenty-sixth to his thirty-fifth year, his literary 
occupations were in desultory translations from 
the German, and in collecting and editing Scot- 
tish ballads and romances; then, from his thirty- 
fifth year to his forty-fourth, came the period of 
his original metrical romances ; and it was not till 
1814, when the "Lay of the Last Mmstrel" and 



EIS IMMEDIATE PREDECESSORS. 181 

"Marmion" and the "Lady of the Lake" had 
gone over the world in thousands, and people were 
detecting a falling off in the poems by which these 
had been succeeded, that he resolved to carry his 
love of the antique and his Scotticism out of that 
metrical style, the power of which was waning, 
and made his first anonymous venture as a novelist 
in Waverley. Here, therefore, it is necessary that 
we should take a retrospective view of the course 
of British novel-writing from the point at which 
we left it in our last lecture, namely, at or about 
the year 1789, on to this year 1814, when the 
author of Waverley burst on the novel-reading 
public like a meteor among the smaller stars. The 
interval is exactly a quarter of a century. 

After Richardson, Fielding, Smoftctt, Sterne, 
Goldsmith, Walpole, and other writers belonging 
to the early part of the reign of George III., the 
respectability of the British novel was kept up, as 
we saw, though its resources were hardly extended, 
by such writers as Mackenzie, Miss Reeve, Miss 
Burney, Beckford, Cumberland, Robert Bage, and 
Dr. John Moore. Besides these respectable writ- 
ers, there were scores of others engaged in pro- 
ducing trashy tales to supply the growing appetite 
for works of fiction which the older novelists had 
created. This was the age of the beginning of 
the so-called " Minerva-Press Novels," which con- 
16 



182 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE, 

tinued to be poured forth in superabundance till 
Scott took the field. About the year 1789, how- 
ever, we find, as might be expected, novelists of a 
better class making their appearance. 

That year, as all know, is a great epoch in 
modern European history. It was the year of 
the French Revolution, when, through blood and 
w^ar and universal agitation, the various countries 
of Europe passed out of ^t system of things 
which had subsisted during the eighteenth cen- 
tury, and entered on a new period of life — the 
period to which we now belong. For most pur- 
poses, the year 1789, and not the year 1800, is 
to be considered as the proper close of the " Eigh- 
teenth Century.?' This is seen best in the history 
of literature. Take the history of British Litera- 
ture for example. It is now an established prac- 
tice among us to date the commencement of a new 
era in British literary history — the era in which 
we still are — from the year 1789, there, or there- 
abouts. As a new social spirit then comes in, — a 
spirit superseding the old Whiggism and Toryism 
of the eighteenth century, or, at least, giving a 
new significance to these terms by reconnecting 
them w^ith first principles, — so there then comes in 
also a new intellectual sj^irit. It is seen working 
in all the forms of our literature. Our philosophy 
begins to deepen itself, afiected partly by the 



HIS IMMEDIATE PREDECESSORS. 183 

deeper social questions which the French Revo- 
hition had forced on the attention of mankind, 
partly by the quiet diffusion among us, through 
such interpreters as Coleridge, of ideas taken from 
the rising philosophy of Germany. Our historical 
literature also takes on a different hue, and begins 
to be characterized, on the one hand, by more of 
that spirit of political innovation and aspiration after 
progress which belonged to the revolutionary epoch, 
and on the other, by a kind of reactionary regard 
for that past which the revolution misrepresented 
and maligned. But, above all, the change was 
visible in our poetry. In all our literary histories 
you will find the epoch of the French Revolution 
marked as the epoch of an interesting revival of 
natural British Poetry, after that interregnum of 
more artificial Poetry which had begun in Dry den. 
It is about this time that the simultaneous publica- 
tions of Burns and Cowper, of Crabbe and Bowles, 
herald in the change of poetic style and matter 
which was consummated by Wordsworth. An at- 
tention rather to the permanent and invariable 
facts of life than to the changing aspects of hu- 
man manners, a deeper reverence for nature, and 
a closer study of all natural appearances, a greater 
ideality of tone, and yet a return to truth and sim- 
plicity of diction — such, variously phrased, were 



184 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. 

the qualities on which, as Wordsworth alleged, the 
revival depended. 

So far as the change was fundamental, it must 
have affected also our Prose Fiction. To some 
extent, we find that it did so. I can here, how- 
ever, be but brief in my indications. 

In the interval between 1789 and 1814, I count 
twenty novelists, of sufficient mark to be remem- 
bered individually in the history of British Prose 
Literature. Two of these are Robert Bage and 
Dr. John Moore, who had begun their career as 
novehsts prior to 1789; the others, named as nearly 
as possible in the order of their appearance, are — 
Thomas Holcroft, Mrs. Charlotte Smith, Sophia 
and Harriet Lee, Mrs, Lichbald, Mrs. Radcliffe, 
Matthew Gregory Lewis, Mrs. Opie, William God- 
win, Anna Maria Porter and Jane Porter, Miss 
Edgeworth, Miss Jane Austen, Mrs. Brunton, Mrs. 
Hamilton, Hannah More, Miss Owenson (after- 
wards Lady Morgan), and the Rev. Charles Ma- 
turin. I must depend very much on your own 
associations with these names for the impressions 
you are likely to take, along with me, as to the 
nature of the chano-e or chan2:es in British novel- 
writing which they represent as having occurred 
in the quarter of a century now under notice ; but 
I may call your attention to one or two facts. 

And, first, it is worth observing that no fewer 



LADY NOVELISTS. 185 

than fourteen ont of the twenty novelists that 
have been named were women. No fact of this 
kind is accidental ; and an investigation concern- 
ing the causes of it might not be without results. 
Probably reasons for it might be found in the state 
of British society at that period, as affected by the 
general condition of Europe, and as leading to a 
somewhat new adjustment of the various kinds 
of intellectual occupation between the sexes — 
men, let us say (and this is statistically the fact), 
transferring themselves to other kinds of litera- 
ture, including metrical Poetry, and retaining the 
ascendency there; w^hile women took possession 
of the Novel. Be the causes of the fact, however, 
Avhat they may, the fact itself is interesting. If 
the Novel, or Prose Fiction, was the fii^fortress in 
the territory of literature which the women seized, 
— nay, if they seized it all the more easily because 
the men, being absent elsewhere, had left it weakly 
garrisoned, — it cannot be denied, at all events, 
that they manned it well. Not only were the 
women in the majority, but they also did the 
duty of the garrison better than the men who 
had been left in it. With the exception of God- 
win, I do not know that any of the male novelists 
I have mentioned could be put in comparison, in 
respect of genuine merit, with such novelists of the 
other sex as Mrs. Radcliffe, Miss Edgeworth, and 
16* 



186 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. 

Miss Austen. Out of this fact, taken along with 
the fact that from that time to this there has been 
an uninterrupted succession of lady novelists, and 
also with the fact that, though the Novel was the 
first fortress into which the sex were admitted in 
any number, they have since found their way into 
other fortresses of the literary domain, not except- 
ing Poetry, nor even History, and have done 
excellent duty there too, h^:^ out of these facts, I 
say, may we not derive a prognostication ? May 
there not be still farther room in the realm of 
intellectual activity for the genius of women ; may 
they not yet be in all the garrisons ? For my 
part, I know not a more unmanly outcry than that 
in fashion asrainst "strons^-minded women." Either 
the phrase is an irony which repetition has turned 
into a serious fallacy, and what is meant is, that 
the so-called " strong-minded women " are 7iot 
strong-minded, and that analogous specimens of 
men would be regarded as weak-minded; or the 
phrase is cruel and mean. No woman yet but was 
better, nobler, ay, and essentially more womanly, 
in precise proportion as her natural abilities had 
received all the education of which they were 
capable. No man really but thinks so, and finds 
it so — at least no man worth his beard. As to 
what may be the inherent difference of intellectual 
and social function involved in the fact of sex, we 



NATIONALITY IN NOVELS. 187 

need not trouble ourselves so very much. What- 
ever the difference is, nature will take ample care 
of it, and it will be all the better pronounced the 
less its manifestation is impeded. It is obvious 
that we have already gained much by the repre- 
sentation which women have been able to make of 
their peculiar dispositions and modes of j^ei'eeption 
in the portion of the field of literature which they 
have already occupied. Perhaps there was a spe- 
cial propriety in their selecting the Prose Fiction 
as the form of literature in which first to express 
themselves, — the capabilities of that form of litera- 
tuie being such that we can conceive women con- 
veying most easily through it those views and per- 
ceptions which, by presupposition, they were best 

qualified to contribute. 

Another statistical fact connected with the list 
of novelists which I have given, is that, out of the 
entire twenty, tivelve were of English, six of Irish, 
and only two of Scottish birth. This proportion 
suggests, with tolerable accuracy, certain easily- 
conceived difierences as regards the themes chosen 
by the novelists, and their modes of treating them. 
To some extent, all of them took general British 
themes, or continental themes, or themes of general 
poetic interest ; but we note also a certain af- 
fection in some of them for the representation of 
peculiarly national manners and circumstances ; 



188 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. 

and, as might be expected, where this is the case, 
the affection follows the accident of birth. Thus 
Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs. Opie, and Miss Austen are 
novelists of English society and English manners ; 
Miss Edgeworth, in not a few of her tales, con- 
stitutes herself, of express jDurpose, a painter and 
critic of Irish manners and Irish society ; and in 
Moore we have a characteristic dash of Scotticism. 
So far as there is an except^9n to what the statisti- 
cal proportion just stated might suggest, it is in 
favor of Scotland. One or two of the English and 
Irish novelists took a fancy for Scottish subjects. 
The two Miss Porters, though of Irish birth, had 
resided long in Edinburgh ; and from the younger 
of them Scottish boys have received that prime 
favorite of theirs, " The Scottish Chiefs," — a ro- 
mance in which, as the boys find out Avhen tliey 
grow older, it is not exactly the historical Wallace 
or the Wallace of Blind Henry that is the hero, 
but a highly modernized Wallace, tremulous with 
the most exquisite sentiments, and carrying in his 
hand, as the saviour of Scotland, alternately a sword 
and a white cambric handkerchief. Mrs. Hamilton, 
also, though born in Ireland, was of Scottish ex- 
traction, and was educated in Scotland ; and her 
"Cottafyers of Glenburnie" is a gjenuine Scottish 
story. And Mrs. Radcliife's first romance was laid 
in Scottish feudal times. 



RE VOL UTl ONAR Y NO VELS : G OD WIN. 189 

Passing to the novels themselves, can we classify 
them into kinds ? Can we discern in them any def- 
inite tendencies of the British novel-writing of the 
l^eriod different from those which existed before ? 
As far as my recollected acquaintance with speci- 
mens of the novels themselves entitles me to judge, 
I think that we can. The novels of the writers I 
have named may, I think, be grouped into three 
classes, each representing a tendency of the British 
prose fiction of the period. 

(1) Perhaps the most characteristic tendency of 
British novel-writing, immediately or soon after the 
year 1789, was to the embodiment in fiction of 
those social speculations and aspirations which had 
sprung out of the French Revolution as observed 
from these islands. I need not tell yeur-how power- 
fully all thoughtful minds in this country were then 
stirred by the tremendous events abroad ; how, on 
the one hand, a veteran Burke was struck aghast, 
and all but abjured his Whiggism, because it 
seemed as if a legion of fiends had come into alli- 
ance with it ; and how, on the other, ardent young 
souls, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge and 
Southey, leaped with enthusiasm, and saw the age 
of gold. Liberty, equality, fraternity ; human prog- 
ress and perfectibility; the iniquity of existing 
institutions — with these and such notions were 
many minds filled. They broke out in various forms, 



190 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. 

— in poems, and in works of prose fiction, as well as 
in pamphlets and doctrinal treatises. In prose fic- 
tion, Bage and Holcroft were representatives of the 
roused democratic sj^irit ; but its greatest represen- 
tative by far was William Godwin. It was in 1794 
that this remarkable man — already well known as 
a political writer, and destined to a long life of far- 
ther literary activity — published his novel entitled 
' Caleb WllUcons y 07\ Thiii^as they are. It was 
intended to be, as he said in his preface, " a study 
and delineation of things passing in the moral 
world," a poetical exposition of the vices and nial- 
arrangements of existing society, " a general re- 
view of the modes of domestic and unrecorded 
despotism by which man becomes the destroyer of 
man." Those of you who remember the novel — ■ 
the tale which it tells of the suflferings of the noble- 
minded and wealthy Falkland, who lives on with 
the consciousness of having committed a murder, 
for which two innocent men have been hanged, and 
of the sufierings which, in self-preservation, he in- 
flicts on the youth, Caleb Williams, his secretary, 
who has come into possession of the fatal secret — 
will judge of the truth of this description. In 
Godwin's later novels the spirit and purpose are 
the same, with variations in the circumstance. The 
action of society upon character, or, as one of his 



NOVEL OF MANNERS: MISS AUSTEN. 191 

critics says, " Man the enemy of man " — such is 
his constant text. 



' Amid the woods the tiger knows his kind ; 
The panther preys not on the panther brood 
Man only is the common foe of man." 



As Godwin's, however, was no vulgar intellect, and 
as his politics were of an ardent and speculative 
cast, so, even now, when his novels are read for 
their purely imaginative interest, they impress 
powerfully. -^ 

(2.) As distinct from the kind of novel w^hich 
Godwin rejDresented, we have, in the list under 
view, various specimens of what may be called the 
Gothic romance of the picturesque and the ter- 
rible. The beginnings of this kind of novel have 
been referred to Walpole, in his Castle of Otranto, 
and to his imitator. Miss Keeve, in her Old Eng- 
lish Baron; but it attained its full development 
in the present period, in the fictions of Mrs. Rad- 
cliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, and, I believe, also 
in those of Maturin, and in some of those of the 
Miss Porters, and of Harriet Lee. In so far as 
the tendency to this kind of fiction involved a 
romantic veneration for the past, it may be re- 
garded as a reaction against the revolutionary 
spirit of the time, as embodied in Godwin and 



192 SCOTT AND HJS INFLUENCE. 

others. But it would be too superficial a view of 
the nature of the tendency, to suppose that it 
originated merely in any such reaction, conscious 
or unconscious. Godwin himself goes back, in 
some of his novels, to feudal times, and is not des- 
titute of power of imagination in old Gothic cir- 
cumstance. We see, indeed, that the great liter- 
ary controversy between Classicism and Romanti- 
cism was a direct result of N:he French Revolution. 
In that crisis, the Gothic depths of the western 
European mind were broken into ; and though, 
politically, the immediate efiect was a disgust of 
the past, and a longing towards the future as the 
era of human emancipation, yet, intellectually, the 
effect was a contempt for classic modes of fancy 
and composition, and a letting loose of the imagi- 
nation upon Nature in her wildest and grandest 
recesses, and upon whatever in human history 
could supply aught in afiinity with the furious 
workings of contemporary passion. The Gothic 
Romance, of the picturesque and the ghastly, af- 
forded the necessary conditions. Gloomy Gothic 
castles in wild valleys, with forests clothing the 
neighboring hills; lawless banditti hovering round; 
the moon bowling fearfully through clouds over 
inland scenes of horror, or illuminating with its 
full blue light Italian bays and fated spots on their 
promontories; monks, tyrannical chieftains, and 



SCOTT'S TENDENCIES. 103 

inquisitors ; shrieks in the night, supernatural 
noises, the tolling of the bell, the heavy footstep 
in the corridor; — "Hark! it approaches; save 
me ! save me ! " — at that instant, the flash of 
lightning through the Gothic window; the door 
dashed open ; the unnameable apparition ; the 
roar of the simultaneous thunder ; — " Ye powers 
of Hell ! " — No, Heaven has its messengers too ; 
the voice cries, " Forbear ! " she 's saved ! she 's 
saved! Of all the jDractitioners of this style of 
art, need I say that Mrs. Kadcliffe is the chief? 
She has been called the Salvator Kosa of British 
prose fiction ; and, in reference to her Sicilian Ho- 
mance^ her Romance of the Forest^ her 3fi/ste7'ies 
of JJdolplio^ and her Italian^ Sir Walter Scott has 
but done her justice when he says T"^' Fielding, 
Richardson, Smollett, and even Walpole, though 
writing upon imaginative subjects, are decidedly 
prose authors ; but Mrs. Radcliffe has a title to be 
considered the first poetess of romantic fiction — 
that is, if actual rhythm shall not be deemed es- 
sential to poetry." Mrs. Radclifie's romances are, 
indeed, of a wholly fantastic kind of Gothic, with 
no whit of foundation in actual knowledge of 
medioBval history. Her characters are but vague, 
melodramatic phantoms, that flit through her de- 
scriptions of scenery, and serve as agents for her 
terrific situations. There is something like treach- 
17 



194 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. 

ery, also, to the true theory of her style, in her 
habit of always solving the mystery at the end 
by purely natural explanations. Monk Lewis, and 
others of the school, were more daring in this 
respect. 

(3) The majority of the novelists of our list, 
however, were, as their predecessors of the eigh- 
teenth century had been, mere painters of life and 
manners, with more or less of humor, and more or 
less of ethical purpose. Moore, the two Miss 
Lees, Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Opie, Miss 
Edgeworth, Mrs. Brunton, Mrs. Hamilton, Hannah 
More, Miss Owenson — all of them lady novelists, 
except one — continued this style of fiction. The 
differences in their novels, as compared with pre- 
vious novels of life and manners, must be consid- 
ered as arising, in part, from the actual differences 
of the life and manners that were to be painted ; 
but in part, also, from a difference in the method 
of description; which last may be resolved into 
the fact, already noted, that women were now tak- 
ing their turn as describers, and bringing their 
l^eculiar tact of perception, and their peculiar 
notions of the right and the tasteful, to the task 
of representing much in society that had been 
omitted before, and especially the ways of their 
own sex. Among these lady novelists, Miss Edge- 
worth and Miss Austen were, undoubtedly, the 



SCOTT'S TENDENCIES. 195 

first in talent. So far as they remind us of pre- 
vious novelists of the other sex, it is most, as 
might be expected, of Richardson; but, while 
resembling him in minuteness of observation, in 
good sense, and in clear moral aim, they present 
many differences. All in all, as far as my informa- 
tion goes, the best judges unanimously prefer Miss 
Austen to any of her contemporaries of the same 
order. They reckon her /Sejise and SensihilUy^ 
her Pride and Prejudice.) her Mansfield Pari., and 
her Emma (which novels were published in her 
lifetime), and also her Nortlianger Abbey., and her 
Persuasion (which were published posthumously) 
as not only better than anything else of the kind 
written in her day, but also among the most per- 
fect and charming fictions in the language. I 
have known the most hard-headed men in ecstasies 
w^ith them; and the only objection I have heard 
of, as brought against them by ladies, is that they 
reveal too many of their secrets. 

We return to Scott. In virtue both of his con- 
stitution and of his education, Scott, if he had 
betaken himself to prose fiction at first, instead of 
deferring his exercises in it to his mature age, 
would have had his connections, in the main, with 
the two last-named schools of British novel-writ- 
ing at the close of the last and the beginning of 



196 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. 

the present century. He would have stood apart 
from Godwin and his class of political and specu- 
lative novelists, or would have even proclaimed 
himself their antagonist; and he would have 
taken rank both among the romance writers of 
the Gothic picturesque, and among the painters 
of contemporary life and manners, — a chief among 
both, by reason of the general superiority of his 
genius, and producing among both those peculiar 
effects which would have resulted from his pas- 
sion for the real in History, from his extensive 
antiquarian knowledge, and from his Scotticism. 
We have his own authority for this statement. 
He tells us that, as early as 1799 or 1800, before 
he had appeared conspicuously as a poet, he had 
meditated the composition of a prose tale of chiv- 
alry, after the example of Walpole's " Castle of 
Otranto," but on a Scottish subject, and with 
"plenty of Border characters and supernatural 
incident." He had actually written some pages 
of such a romance, to be entitled, "Thomas the 
Rhymer," when circumstances changed his inten- 
tion. He did not, however, abandon the idea of 
a Scottish prose romance. In 1805 he wrote a 
portion of Waverley ; and though that, too, was 
thrown aside, the impression made upon him by 
Miss Edgeworth's Irish tales was such as to con- 
vince him that, when he had leisure, he should be 



WAVERLEY NOVELS CLASSIFIED. 197 

able to do something, in a similar style, for the 
representation of Scottish manners. The leisure 
came in 1814, when Waverley was comiDleted and 
j)nblished. Between that date and his death, in 
1832, he gave to the world, beside much else, the 
rest of the series of the Waverley novels. 

If we omit one or two tales now included in 
the series, but not originally published in it, the 
Waverley Novels are twenty-nine in number. Of 
these twenty-nine novels, unless I err in my recol- 
lection of their contents, twelve belong to the 
eighteenth century, whether to the earlier or to 
the later part of it, namely: Waverley^ Guy Man- 
nering^ The Antiquary^ Rob Roy., The Blach 
Dwarfs The Heart of Mid-Lothian., The Bride 
of Lammermoor., St. Ronan's Well., RedgatChtlet., 
The Highland Widoio, The Tioo Hrovers, and 
The Surgeon's Daughter ; six belong to the sev- 
enteenth century, namely: Old Mortality., The 
Legend of Montrose., The Pirate., Woodstock., The 
Fortunes of JSFigel, and Reveril of the Peak; 
three to the sixteenth, namely: The Monastery., 
The Abbott., and iLenilioorth ; three to the fif- 
teenth, namely: Quentin Purioard., The Fair 
Maid of Perth., and Anne of Geier stein / one to 
the fourteenth, namely : Castle Dangerous ; and 
the remaining four to other centuries as far back 
as the end of the eleventh, namfely : Ivanhoe.^ The 
17# 



198 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. 

Betrothed^ The Talisman^ and Coimt Hohert of 
Paris. Thus it apj^ears that, though Scott did 
not hesitate to throw an occasional novel pretty 
far back into feudal and Gothic times, he pre- 
ferred, on the whole, ground nearer to his own 
age, where he could blend the interest of romantic 
adventure with that of homely and humoKous 
representation of manners. Take another numer- 
ical classification of the n6¥:els on a different prin- 
cii^le. Out of the whole twenty-nine, no fewer 
than nineteen, as I calculate, have their scenes laid 
wholly, or in great part, in Scotland, and are, 
almost throughout, novels of Scottish circum- 
stance ; five have their scenes laid in England, one 
of which, however, The Fortunes of Nigel^ has 
much of Scottish circumstance in it; two have 
their scenes on the Continent, one of which, how- 
ever, Quentin Durioard^ has a Scotchman for its 
hero ; and three are Oriental in their ground and 
reference — of which one also. The Talisman^ is 
dedicated to the adventures of a Scotchman. 
Thus, as regards place, it a23pears that Scott kejit 
by preference near home ; and that, but for some 
six or seven novels spared for purely English or 
for more remote themes, the name of the " Scot- 
tish Novels" might be applied with accuracy to 
the entire series. Combining the two classifica- 
tions, and taking note of the order in which the 



THE WAVERLEY NOVELS. 199 

novels were jDublished, we can farther see, very 
distinctly, that Scott began with those which were 
Scottish in their subjects, and lay nearest his own 
age; and that only after he had pretty well ex- 
hausted that ground and that time, did he work 
far backwards chronologically, and away from 
Scotland geographically. Ivanlioe^ which was his 
first novel not Scottish in subject, and also the 
first thrown farther back in time than the seven- 
teenth century, was the tenth novel of the series 
in the order of composition. 

You do not expect me, I am sure, to criticize 
the Waverley novels. We all know them, and 
we all enjoy them. There has been a deluge of 
British novels since they were written, — many 
of them most rich and striking, and some of them 
presenting subtle characteristics which we do not 
seek in the Waverley novels, and which recom- 
mend them in an express manner to recent tastes ; 
but when we are fatigued after a hard day's work, 
and want a book in the evening, do wx not, all of 
us, find it answer our purpose to fall back on a 
Waverley novel? At such times, do we not run 
over the series mentally, or on the book-shelf, to 
see which of the novels it is that lies farthest off 
in our recollection ; and, even should that chance 
to be the poorest of the set, do we not find it, 
after all, very pleasant reading? And, in this 



200 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. 

way, do we not systematically recover one after 
another of the series, just as it is slipping over 
the horizon of our memory, and retain all in per- 
manent possession? And, when we think how 
many can use the books in this way, — that it is 
not the rich or the learned only that can thus wile 
away an hour of fatigue over these volumes, but 
to myriads of the poor and laborious, wherever 
our language is spoken, and, through translation, 
farther still, they serve the same refreshing func- 
tion, as being so simple in matter and of such 
general interest, that the unlearned as well as the 
learned can understand them, and, at the same 
time, so j^ure and healthy in the main that no 
mind can take harm from them, — have we not, in 
this thought, some measure of the gratitude which, 
if only on the score of innocent amusement, the 
world owes to Scott? He was a modest, hearty 
man, with as little of the cant of authorship about 
him as any author that ever lived ; he even de- 
tested that cant, talked as little of books as any 
man, and was a living rebuke to that miserable 
pedantry of our book-making days, which thinks 
and acts as if books were the only things of inter- 
est in the world, as if the earth were mere stand- 
ing-ground for writei-s and printers, the sea ink, 
and the sky parchment; and hence, when he 
spoke of his own novels, or of j)rose fiction in 



THE WAVERLEY NOVELS. 201 

general, it was enough for him to think that 
the means of innocent amusement were thereby- 
increased, and that men, in the midst of their 
business, might thereby have their minds a httle 
Hghtened, and their hearts stirred by cheerful fan- 
cies. In attaining this, he attained more than he 
cared to mention as involved in it. It is the part 
of all poets and creative writers thus to make rich 
the thought of the world by additions to its stock 
of well-known fancies ; and when we think of the 
quantity of Scott's creative writing, as well as of 
its popularity in kind, — of the number of roman- 
tic stories he gave to the world, and the plenitude 
of vivid incident in each ; of the abundance in his 
novels of picturesque scenes and descriptions of 
nature, fit for the painter's art, and actually em- 
ploying it ; and, above all, of the immense multi- 
tude of characters, real and fantastic, heroic and 
humorous, which his novels have added to that 
ideal population of beings bequeathed to the 
world by the poetic genius of the past, and hov- 
ering round us and overhead as airy agents and 
companions of existence, — he evidently takes his 
place as, since Shakspeare, the man whose con- 
tribution of material to the hereditary British 
imagination has been the largest and the most 
various. Strike out Scott, and all that has been 
accumulated on him by way of interest on his 



202 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. 

capital, from the British mind of the last seventy 
years, and how much poorer we should be ! His 
influence is more widely difl^used through certain 
departments of European and American litera- 
ture than that of any individual writer that has 
recently lived ; and, many generations hence, the 
tinge of that influence will still be visible. 

It was no slight thing for the interests of Brit- 
ish prose fiction, in relation to other established 
forms of our literature, thaV^such a man as Scott, 
already laurelled as a metrical poet, and possess- 
ing, besides, a general reputation in the world of 
letters, should have devoted the last eighteen 
years of his life to activity in that particular field. 
Prose Fiction assumed, in consequence, a higher 
relative dignity ; nay. Prose itself could be con- 
scious of having advanced its standard several 
stages nearer to the very citadel of Poesy. Apart, 
however, from the extension given by the Wa- 
verley novels to the prose form of fiction in the 
general realm of imaginative writing, we note 
several other influences which they had on the di- 
rection and aims of imaginative writing, whether 
in prose or in verse. For an exposition of one of 
these influences — the influence exerted by Scott's 
peculiar method of viewing and describing natu- 
ral scenery upon our modern ari of landscape, 
whether in literature or in painting — I may refer 



THE HISTORICAL NOVEL. 203 

you to Mr. Ruskin, to whose observations on such 
a subject it is not for me to add anything. You 
will find in the third volume of Mr. Ruskin's 
" Modern Painters " ample illustrations of Scott's 
fine sense of the picturesque in natural scenery, 
and especially of that by which Mr. Ruskin sets 
so much store, his fondness for color and sensi- 
tiveness to its effects; and you will there also find 
distinctions acutely expounded between Scott's 
mode of viewing nature and Wordsworth's mode, 
and also between Scott's mode and that of Ten- 
nyson and other more recent poets. It remains 
for me, in concluding this lecture, to call your 
attention again to those two characteristics of 
Scott which we agi-eed to consider as the most 
prominently marked in his genius, — his venera- 
tion for the past, or the tendency of his genius to 
the historical; and, as the special form of that, 
his Scotticism. Out of these characteristics, as 
might be expected, spring two of the most nota- 
ble influences which he has exerted on British 
l^rose fiction. 

And, first, by the historical character of his 
novels, he communicated a historical tendency 
to our literature of fiction, which has not yet 
exhausted itself, and which has led to important 
results not ending in fiction only. Scott is the 
father of the Modern Historical ISTovel. There 



204 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. 

had been attempts at the thing before ; but he 
first estabUshed this form of writing among us. 
In virtue, however, of his own affection not so 
much for the whole of the historical past as for 
the Gothic portion of that past, from the tenth 
or eleventh century downwards, — that is, for the 
ages of European chivalry and feudalism, and the 
times succeeding them, — he established the His- 
torical Novel anion p' us, so far as his own labors 
went, not in its entire capabilities, but only as 
applied to the range of the Gothic period, mediae- 
val and modern. Scott is said to be the founder 
of the Novel of Chivalry. Such a designation, 
however, though accurate so far, is not sufficiently 
extensive. By far the greater number of his nov- 
els, as we have seen, are not novels of the age of 
Chivalry, nor even of that of Feudalism, but refer 
to times subsequent to the Reformation, and, most 
of them, to the latter half of the seventeenth or 
to the eighteenth century. The phrase "Histor- 
ical Novel " is, therefore, the more suitable ; or, to 
be more precise still, " the Historical Novel of the 
Gothic period in Europe." Those who have in 
their minds the proper signification of the words 
"Gothic period," as meaning the period of the 
leading activity of the so-called Gothic race in 
civilization, will understand what is here meant. 
There is no doubt that Scott did much to rouse 



SCOTT'S MEDIEVALISM. 205 

an interest in this period of history, to settle our 
filial affections upon it as that whence we derive 
immediately all that is in us and about us ; and 
also that he did much to interpret it to us, to 
make its habits, its costumes, its modes of life and 
action, more conceivable and intelligible. Even 
in such a matter as the revival among us of a 
taste for Gothic architecture, and for mediaeval art 
generally, Scott's influence may be traced. 

Here, however, comes in a question which was 
reserved. Was Scott's wholesome influence in the 
matter of Gothicism and medisevalism direct or 
indirect ? Did he do the good he has done in this 
department by his own actual teachings, or only 
by setting a fashion which has led, or may lead, to 
more earnest inquiries and to more accurate teach- 
ings ? Did Scott really understand the earUer 
feudal and chivalrous times which he represents 
in some of his novels ? Were his notions of those 
times authentic and true, or only fictitious make- 
shifts? Mr. Ruskhi, with all his admiration for 
Scott, pronounces decidedly against him in this 
question. He says that Scott, though he "had 
some confused love of Gothic architecture, because 
it was dark, picturesque, old, and like nature," knew 
nothing really about it, and was wrong in all he 
thought he knew. He says further, that Scott's 

" romance and antiquarianism his knighthood and 
18 



206 SCOTT AND BIS INFLUENCE. 

monkery," are all false, and were known by him- 
self to be false. Baron Bunsen gives a similar 
opinion ; and, indeed, I know that the opinion is 
general among men whose judgment in such a 
matter is entitled to respect. I have heard a 
very good judge say that the German novel "Si- 
donia the Sorcerer," is a deeper and truer delin- 
eation of mediaeval life than any of Scott's. For 
my own part, I cannot quite ^ree with this depre- 
ciation of Scott's mediaevahsm and feudalism, or, 
at least, with the manner of it. I do not think 
that it was his antiquarian information that was 
in fault; at least, in reading his Ivanhoe^ or his 
Talis'man^ or his Quentin Durioard, or his Fair 
Maid of Perth^ • — in all of which he certainly 
flashes on the fancy in a manner that historians 
had not done before, and, with all their carping, 
have not found out the art of doing yet, a vivid 
condition of things intended to pass for mediceval- 
ism and feudalism, — I cannot find that our severest 
men of research have yet furnished us with that 
irrefragable and self-evidencing scheme or theory 
of Medisevalism and Feudalism, by the test of 
which what Scott proffers as such is to fall so 
obviously into rubbish. Men, in hovering over a 
time, must fancy somewhat about it ; and a very 
vivid "somewhat" will stand till accurate knowl- 
edge furnishes the imagination with the substitute. 



SCOTT'S DEFECT. 207 

Scott's "somewhat" about Chivalry and FeudaUsra, 
besides tliat it will fade fast enough as we get a 
better, was not picked up at random, or without 
an amount of acquaintance with the materials that 
Avas in his time rather uncommon. 

What in Scott's Gotbicism and Mediaevalism is 
false, arises, I believe, from a certain defect in his 
genius, which would have produced, and perhajDS 
did produce, corresponding falsity in his imagina- 
tions out of the Gothic and medieval regions al- 
together — to wit, his deficiency in the purely spec- 
ulative faculty. The only Scottish thing that Scott 
had not in him was Scotch metaphysics. His mind 
was not of the investigating, or philosophic, or 
speculative type ; he was not, in the distinctive 
sense of the term, a thinker. Craniologists see 
this defect, they tell us, in the very shape of his 
head — high above the eairs, but not long from 
back to front. Whether the defect was in his 
head or in his thumbs, there it was, and it pro- 
duced its consequences. It is in this most con- 
spicuously that he falls short of Shakspeare. It 
is owing to this that, in so many of his more stately 
and ambitious characters — as when he tries to 
paint a Cromwell or a Kaleigh, or a Queen Eliz- 
abeth, or a Louis the Eleventh, or an enthusiastic 
mediffival monk — it seems as if he could but give 
a certain exterior account of the physiognomy, cos- 



208 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. 

tume, gesture, but had no power to work from the 
mner mind outwards, so as to make the characters 
live. He cannot get at the mode of thinking of 
such personages ; indeed, the notion of a " mode 
of thinking " as belonging to j^ersons, or to ages, 
and to be seized in representing them, was not 
very famiHar to him. If he did not reproduce 
the earnest and powerful thought of the mediae- 
val period, its real feelings^nd beliefs, it was be- 
cause his philosophy of the human mind and of 
human history was not so deep and subtle as to 
make feelings, beliefs, and modes of thought, the 
objects of his anxious imagination. But, if he 
failed in representing a great and peculiar mind 
of the historical past, he would equally have failed, 
and for the same reason, in representing a great 
and peculiar mind of the historical present. This 
is a feat indeed, to which I do not think we can 
boast that many of our writers of prose fiction 
have been, at any time, competent. 

The wonder is that Scott, notwithstanding his 
defect, succeeded so marvellously where he did 
succeed. Need I say where that is ? Do we not 
feel that in his representations of homely and even 
of striking and heroic Scottish characters (with the 
exception already implied, and accounted for, of 
his Presbyterians and Covenanters), in a period 
of Scottish society near to his own time, — in his 



HIS SCOTTISH CHARACTERS. 209 

representations of Scottish life and Scottish hu- 
mors, nay of Scottish behefs and modes of think- 
ing in the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries, 
(repeat the exception, at least partially), or even 
farther back still, where his shrewd observations 
of i^resent human nature could cooperate with his 
antiquarian knowledge in filling out a social picture, 
— he was simply as successful as it was possible to 
be ? Are not his Davie Gellatlys, his Dan die Din- 
monts, his Counsellor Pleydells, his Oldbucks, his 
Saunders Mucklebackets, his Edie Ochiltrees, his 
Caddie Headriggs, his Nicol Jarvies, his Caleb Bal- 
derstones, his Dugald Dalgettys, his Meg Doddses, 
and the like, — nay, in a more tragic and elevated 
order, are not his Meg Merrilieses, his Rob Roys, 
his Redgauntlets, his Jeannie Deanses^^ — as per- 
fect creations as any in literature? These, and 
especially the homelier characters, are simply as 
well done as they could possibly be ; and, in their 
conception and execution, I do not know that 
Scott is inferior to Shakspeare. Is it that in such 
cases his Scottish heart and his poetic instinct, 
acting on w^hat he saw and knew, whirled him 
beyond his conscious power of speculation ; or is 
it that, after all, there was a speculative faculty 
in Scott which he had not worked? From the 
sln-ewdness and sagacity of some of his critical 
prefaces to his novels, where he discusses princi- 
18* 



210 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. 

2)les of literature without seeming to call them 
such, I am sometimes tempted to believe the lattei". 
And so, after all, Scott is greatest in his Scotti- 
cism. It is as a painter of Scottish nature and 
Scottish life, an interpreter of Scottish beliefs and 
Scottish feelings, a narrator of Scottish history, 
that he attains to the height of his genius. He 
has Scotticised European literature. He has in- 
terested the world in the little land. It had been 
heard of before; it had given the world some 
reason to be interested in it before ; with, at no 
time, more than a million and a half of souls in 
it, it had spoken and acted -with some emphasis in 
relation to the bigger nations around it. But, 
since Scott, the Thistle, till then a wayside weed, 
has had a great promotion in universal botany, 
and blooms, less prickly than of yore, but the 
identical Thistle still, in all the gardens of the 
world. All round the world the little land is 
famous ; tourists flock to admire its scenery, while 
they shoot its game ; and afar off, when the kilted 
regiments (Jlo Britisli work, and the pibroch shrills 
them to th/e work they do, and men, marking what 
they do, ask whence they come, the answer is, 
" From the land of Scott." 

" O Caledonia, stern and wild, 
Meet nurse for a poetic child! " 



SCOTTICISM. 211 

sang Scott long ago. Caledonia nursed hhn^ and 
he has repaid the nursing. And this man was 
born amongst yoit! This city gave him birth. 
All Scotland claims him, but here he had his 
2:)eculiar home. Nor was he tdtimus Scotorion 
nor the last of the men of Edinburgh. You 
have since had among you, born among you or 
naturaHzed among you from other parts of Scot- 
land, other specimens of the national breed — 
Jeffrey, Chalmers, Wilson, Miller, Hamilton. Na- 
ture abhors duplicates ; and though in all of these 
there was an element of characteristic Scotticism, 
and this was a source of their strength, all of 
them were men by themselves, powerful by rea- 
son of their independent mould and structure, 
and not one of them a repetition of -Seott. This 
is as it should be. Scotticism is not one invaria- 
ble thing, fixed and intransmutable. It does not 
consist merely in vaunting and proclaiming itself, 
in working in Scottish facts, Scottish traditions, 
Scottish reminiscences — all of which has perhaps 
been done enough; it may be driven inwards; 
it may exist internally as a mode of thought ; and 
there may be efiicient Scotticism where not one 
word is said of the Thistle, and where the lan- 
guage and the activity are catholic and cosmopol- 
itan. And, seeing that it is so, need we suppose 
that we have yet seen the last of the Scotchmen, 



212 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. 

the last of the men of Edinburgh ? N^o ! The 
drain may still be southwards ; Scotland now 
subserves, politically at least, the higher unity of 
Great Britain, just as that unity in its turn sub- 
serves a larger unity still, not so obviously carved 
out in the body of the surrounding world. At 
the time when Scotland was united to her great 
neighbor, she was made partaker of an intellectual 
accumulation and an inheritance of institutions, 
far richer, measured by the mode of extension, 
than she had to offer to that neighbor in return ; 
and since that period, while much of the effort 
of Scotland has been in continuation of her own 
separate development, much has necessarily and 
justly been ruled by the law of her fortunate 
l^artnership. And so for the future, it may be the 
internal Scotticism, working on British, or on still 
more general objects, and not the Scotticism that 
"works only on Scottish objects of thought, that 
may be in demand in literature as well as in other 
walks. But while Scotland is true to herself and 
while nature in her and her social conditions co- 
operate to impart to her sons such an education 
as heretofore, there needs be no end to her race of 
characteristic men, nor even to her home-grown 
and home-supported literaturCo And, if so of 
Scotland at large, so relatively of the city that is 
her centre. While the traditions of Edinburgh 



YOUNG EDINBURGH. 213 

are not forgotten, nor her monuments destroyed, 
nor her beauties eradicated ; while the Castle still 
frowns in the midst, and the Lion of Arthur's 
Seat still keeps guard, and the wooded Corstor- 
phines lie soft on one side, and the Pentlands 
loom larger behind, and the same circle of ob- 
jects surrounds the ravished sight by day, and at 
night the lamp-lit darkness of the city's own 
heights and hollows is one glittering picturesque, 
and far off Inchkeith light flashes and disappears, 
piercing this nocturnal picturesque intermittingly, 
as with the gleam of a distant mystery ; so long, 
if but human will and industry answer as they 
ought, may this city keep up her intellectual suc- 
cession. There are great ones gone, and nature 
abhors duplicates ; but - — 

" Other spirits there are', standing? apart 
Upon the forehead of this town to come." 



LECTURE IV. 



BEITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

ENTJMERATION OP BRITISH NOVELISTS OF THE LAST FORTY-FIVE 
YEARS — STATISTICS OF NOVEL- WRITING DURING THIS PERIOD — 
CLASSIFICATION OF RECENT NOVELS INTO THIRTEEN KINDS — 
SIR LYTTON BTTLWER'S PROPOSED CLASSIFICATION OF NOVELS, 
AND HIS OWN VERSATILITY — FASHIONABLE NOVELISTS — DICK- 
ENS AND THACKERAY, AS REPRESENTATIVES OF A NEW ERA IN 
THE HISTORY OF THE BRITISH NOVEL — THE TWO COMPARED AS 
ARTISTS— COMPARED AS ETHICAL TEACHERS — REALISTIC ART 
AND ROMANTIC ART IN NOVELS — IMITATIONS OF DICKENS AND 
THACKERAY — THE YEAR 184S AN IMPORTANT YEAR TO DATE 
FROM, IN LITERARY AS WELL AS IN POLITICAL HISTORY— PER- 
SEVERING SPIRIT OF REALISM IN RECENT PROSE FICTIONS, AND 
APPLICATION OF THIS SPIRIT TO THE REPRESENTATION OF 
FACTS PECULIARLY CONTEMPORARY; MISS BRONTE, ETC. — 
GREAT DEVELOPMENT OF THE NOVEL OF PURPOSE, AS SHOWN 
IN SECTARIAN NOVELS, NOVELS OF THE FORMATION OF CHAR- 
ACTER, NOVELS CURATIVE OR SATIRICAL OF SKEPTICISM, ETC. — 
MR. KINGSLEY AND THE AUTHOR OF "TOM BROWN" — INCREASE 
OF THE POETICAL SPIRIT IN NOVELS — SPECULATIONS AS TO THE 
NOVEL OF THE FUTURE, AND DESIDERATA IN NOVEL-WRITING. 



The British N"ovelists since Scott are a very 
numerous body. Among them may be reckoned 
some of those mentioned in my last Lecture as 
hnYiug preceded Scott in the field of Prose Fiction 



LIST OF NOVELISTS. 215 

> 

— particularly Mrs. Opie, Godwin, the two Miss 

Portei-s, Miss Edgeworth, Lady Morgan, and Mr. 
Matiirin. Though these had all preceded Scott 
as writers of j)rose fiction, they continued to write 
novels after the author of Waverley had become 
the acknowledged king of that species of literature; 
and some of them were not less affected than their 
juniors by his surpassing influence. Then, in the 
list of British novelists who made their appearance 
during the eighteen years in which the Waverley 
novels were in progress, — some very shortly after 
the series had been begun, and others just as it 
was closing, and Scott was retiring from the scene, 

— I count no fewer than thirty-five names of some 
past or present note — to wit, in Scotland, or of 
Scottish birth, and under the immediate shadow 
of the author of Waverley, John Gait, Mrs. John- 
stone, Miss Ferrier, the Ettrick Shepherd, Allan 
Cunningham, Scott's son-in-law Lockhart, Pro- 
fessor Wilson, Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, Andrew 
Picken, and David M. Moir ; in L-eland, or of Irish 
birth, Mr. Thomas Colley Grattan, Banim, Crofton 
Croker, Gerald Griffin, and William Carleton ; and 
in England, and chiefly of English birth, Godwin's 
daughter Mrs. Shelley, Lady Caroline Lamb, Mr. 
Peacock, Thomas Hope, Leigh Hunt, Theodore 
Hook and his brother Dr. James Hook, James 
Morier, Mr. Lister, Mr. Plumer Ward, Mr. Gleig, 



216 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

Mr. Horace Smith, Miss Mitforcl, Miss Land on, 
Mr. Disraeli, Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, Mrs. 
Gore, Captain Marryat, Mr. James, and Mrs. Trol- 
lope. The majority of these, it will be observed, 
survived Scott; and not a few of them, though 
they had taken their places as novel-writers while 
Scott was alive, attained their full celebrity in that 
capacity after Scott was gone. In the group of 
some ten or twelve actit^ novel-writers upon 
whom the future hojoes of the British novel were 
supposed to rest in 1832, the year of Scott's death, 
were Theodore Hook, Miss Mitford, Mr. Disraeli, 
Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, Mrs. Gore, Mr. James, 
and Mrs. Trollope. Several of these are still with 
us, and have certainly done more for the novel, in 
the matter of quantity at least, than could have 
been expected from them, — Sir Bulwer Lytton 
having produced in all some five-and-twenty 
novels ; Mrs. Gore and Mrs. Trolloj^e I know not 
how many; Mr. James I know not how many; 
and Mr. Disraeli having escaped similar productive- 
ness only by that series of events which diverted 
his attention to politics, and has made him a Brit- 
ish minister. To this group of novelists left in the 
field at Scott's death, there have been added, in 
the course of the quarter of a century which has 
elapsed since then, a little legion of new recruits. 
I will not venture on a complete list of their 



S TA TIS TICS OF NO VEL - WEI TING . 217 

> 
names ; but when I mention those of Lady Bless- 

ington, Miss Martineau, Mrs. S. C. Hall, Mr. Har- 
rison Ainsworth, Mr. Leitch Ritchie, the Howitts, 
Mr. Folkestone Williams, Charles Dickens, Mr. 
Lever, Mr. Samuel Warren, Douglas Jerrold, El- 
liot Warburton, Mr. James Grant, Mrs. Crowe, 
Miss Jewsbury, William Makepeace Thackeray, 
Mr. Lewes, Mr. Shirley Brooks, Mr. Whyte Mel- 
ville, Mr. Wilkie Collins, the brothers Mayhew, Mr. 
Charles Reade, Mr. James Hannay, Mr. Whitty, 
Mr. Anthony Trollope, Mrs. Marsh, Mrs. Oliph- 
ant. Miss Kavanagh, Miss Mulock, Miss Sewell, 
Miss Yonge, Miss Craik, Miss Bronte, Mrs. Gas- 
kell, Charles Kingsley, and the author of Tom 
frozen, they will suffice to suggest the others. 
All in all, Avere we to include in the-eatalogue of 
" British Novelists since Scott," all who have writ- 
ten novels with some degree of popular success 
from the date of the first Waverley novels to the 
present time, the catalogue, I believe, would in- 
clude over a hundred names.^ You will imder- 
stand that I do not suppose included in this cata- 
logue the contemporary American writers of j^rose 

1 The names cited by me are those of the writers witli whose 
works my own acquaintance, direct or indirect, chances to be 
greatest; but, in the list prefixed to the second volume of Mr. 
Jeaffreson's Novels and Novelists (1858), I count thirty-five addi- 
tional names, and every season is adding fresh ones. 
19 



218 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

fiction. These also have been numerous, and there 
have been among them, as you know, writers 
whose works have interested as powerfully on this 
side of the Atlantic as on the other; but, except 
by implication, I do not take them into account. 

If a list of the British novelists since Scott seems 
formidable, how much more formidable would be 
the sight of the novels produced by them gathered 
into one heap ! On this poiM allow me to present 
you Avith some statistics. The British Museum 
authorities cannot be sure that they receive copie's 
of all the novels published in the British Islands ; 
but it is likely that their collection is more com- 
plete, for the period with which we are now con- 
cerned, than any other that exists. JSTow, I liave 
been informed that the number of novels standing 
on the shelves of the British Museum Library as 
having been published in Britain in the year 1820, 
— i. €., when the Waverley novels were at the 
height of their popularity, — is 26 in all, counting 
76 volumes; that, ten years later, or in 1830, when 
the Waverley series was nearly finished, the yield 
to the library in this department had increased to 
101 books, or 205 volumes within the year; that, 
twenty years later, or in 1850, the yield was 98 
books, or 210 volumes; and that for the year 1856, 
the yield was 88 books, or 201 volumes. Taking 
these data as approximately accurate, they give us 



STATISTICS OF NOVEL-WRITING. 219 

the cwrions fact that the annual yield of British 
novels had been quadrupled by the time of Scott's 
death as compared with what it had been when 
he was in the middle of his Waverley series, — 
having risen from 26 a year, or a new novel every 
fortnight, to about 100 a year, or nearly two new 
novels every week ; and, moreover, that this j^ro- 
jDortion of about 100 new novels every year, or 
two every week, has continued j^retty steady since 
Scott's death, or, if there has been any change, has 
fallen off lately rather than increased. Making an 
average calculation from these facts, I find that 
there may have been in all about 3000 novels, 
counting about 7000 separate volumes, produced 
in these islands since the publication of " Waver- 
ley." And this corresponds pretty "well with a 
calculation made on independent grounds. In 
the London Book Catalogue, giving a classified 
Index of all books published iA Great Britain from 
the year 1816 to the year 1851 inclusive, the novels, 
or works of prose fiction, occupy twenty-two pages, 
and amount to about 3300 separate entries. In 
this list, however, reprints of old novels, as well as 
translations and reprints of imported novels, are 
included. Balancing these against the probable 
yield of the six years, from 1852 to 1857 inclusive, 
not embraced in the catalogue, I believe that my 



220 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

calculation, as just stated, may j^ass as near the 
truth. 

N'ow, you don't exjDect me to have read, during 
my pilgrimage, these 7000 volumes of British 
novels. The thing is practicable. It is satisfac- 
tory to think that, by sticking to two novels a 
week, any one who chooses may, at the i:>resent 
rate, keep uj? with the velocity of the novel-pro- 
ducing apparatus at work among us, and not have 
a single novel of deficit when he balances at the 
year's end. But I have not done it. I have read 
a good many novels — perhaps specimens, at least, 
of all our best novelists ; but, in what I have to 
say, I have no objection that you should consider 
me as one speaking of the composition of the mass, 
in virtue of having inserted the tasting-scoop into 
it at a good many points ; and I shall trust a good 
deal to your own acquaintance with recent novels 
for the extension and correction, as well as for the 
corroboration of my statements. What I propose 
to do is, first, to classify, in some sort of manner, 
the British novels that have made their appear- 
ance in the interval between Scott and our two 
great living representatives of a distinct style of 
prose fiction, Dickens and Thackeray — tracing 
certain general features in the miscellaneous aggre- 
gate, and alluding, as far as my knowledge serves 
me, to certain works of peculiar mark ; then to say 



CLASSIFICATION OF RECENT NOVELS. 221 

something of Dickens and Thackeray esi^ecially, 
and of their eflects on Prose Fiction; then, to 
indicate certain tendencies of British novel- writing- 
discernible, I think, in the works of one or two 
writers who have come into the field since Dick- 
ens and Thackeray were in divided possession of 
it ; and lastly, in continuation of this, and by way 
of appropriate close to these lectures, to indulge 
in a few speculations as to the possibilities of the 
British IsTovel of the future. 

In a classification of British novels from the 
date of Scott's first occupation of the domain of 
Prose Fiction, it is in accordance with what we 
might expect that we should find a considerable 
space occuj)ied by (1) The Novel ow Scottish 
Life and Manners, either in direct imitation of 
Scott, or in continuation and extension of his 
patriotic illustrations. This is, accordingly, what 
we do find. By far the largest proportion of those 
whom we have named as Scottish writers of fiction 
after Scott — Gait, Mrs. Johnstone, Miss Ferrier, 
Hogg, Allan Cunningham, Lockhart, Wilson, Sir 
Thomas Dick Lauder, Picken, and Moir — devoted 
by far the largest proportion of their labor in this 
waUv to the composition of pictures and stories of 
Scottish life. Li all of them, so far as they fol- 
lowed this line of fiction, Scott's influence may be 

19* 



222 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

traced; but there are few of them in whom — 
"whether by reason of independent peculiarities of 
their minds, or by reason of their having been 
natives of other i^arts of Scotland than that to 
which Scott belonged, or by reason of their having 
gone through different courses of Scottish experi- 
ence from his — a peculiar and original vein of 
Scotticism is not discernible. Thus, in Hogg we 
have more of the humble shepherd-life of the Scot- 
tish Lowlands ; in Gait and Picken, more of the 
shrewd West-country Scottish life ; and, I may 
add, in Hugh Miller's Scenes and Legends of the 
North of Scotland, more of the life and character 
of that part of Scotland where the Norse, or Scan- 
dinavian, borders on the Celtic. In one of his 
novels, also. Gait carries his Scotchman across the 
Atlantic, and so exhibits Scotticism at work amid 
conditions in which Scott had never j^laced it. 
Finally, from Lockhart and Wilson, as men of 
extra-Scottish scholarship and culture, though they 
also selected native themes for their fictions, and 
grew up in close relations to Scott, we have illus- 
trations of Scottish life and manners, conceived in 
a different literary spirit, and presenting different 
characteristics. In Wilson's Lights and Shadows 
of Scottish Life, and in his other Scottish stories, 
we have, unless my impression of them deceives 
me, a spirit of lyrical pathos, and of poetical Area- 



CLASSIFICATION OF RECENT NOVELS. 223 

dianism, which tinges, without obscuring, the real 
Scottish color, and reminds us of the Lake poet 
and disciple of Wordsworth, as well as of the fol- 
lower of Scott ; while in his JVoctes Anihrosicmce, 
he burst away in a riot of Scotticism on which 
Scott had never ventured, — a Scotticism not only 
real and humorous, but daringly imaginative and 
poetic, to the verge of Lakism and beyond, — dis- 
playing withal an originality of manner natural to 
a new cast of genius, and a command of resources 
in the Scottish idiom and dialect unfathomed even 
by Scott. Wilson's "Ettrick Shepherd" is one of 
the most extraordinary creations of recent prose 
fiction. But it is not only novelists of Scottish 
birth that have occupied themselves, since Scott, 
in delineating Scottish nature and Scottish liumors 
and characters. As Wordsworth purposely made 
the hero of his "Excursion" a Scottish peddler, so 
from the time of Scott to the present day, not a 
few English novelists have paid Scotland the com- 
j^liment of treating it as an ideal land of rugged 
sublimity, both physical and moral, nearer to pri- 
meval nature, and less civilized and sophisticated 
than other parts of the British dominions, and 
have either laid their scenes there, or have fetched 
thence occasional characters, with all their Doric 
about them, to demean themselves among the 
Southerns in a way very different from that of 



224 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

such older literary representatives of the Scot as 
MacSarcasm and MacSycophant. For an example 
I may refer to Mr. Kingsley's Sandy Mackaye in 
Alton Locke — the cynical old Scotchman who 
keeps a book-stall in London, beats fallacies out 
of the young tailor by his talk, and rectifies, to a 
considerable extent, whatever is wrong in his 
neighborhood. 

Besides the Scottish Novfel, however, or the 
novel with Scottish character and circumstance in 
it, there has been (2) The Novel of Ieish Life 
AND Manners. This had been initiated, as we 
have seen, by Miss Edgeworth and j^ractised by 
Miss Oweuson and others before Scott had estab- 
lished the corresponding Scottish Novel; but, as 
was natural, the example of what Scott had done 
for the sister-land helped to stimulate new Irish 
genius in the patriotic direction. Besides some 
of the later tales of Miss Edgeworth, we have, 
therefore, as specimens of the Irish Novel since 
Scott, the fictions of Banim, Crofton Croker, Grif- 
fin, Carleton, and Lover, and some of those of Mr. 
Lever, and Mrs. S. C. Hall. 

As regards (3) The Novel of English Life 
AND Manners, it may be said, I think, that, 
though there have been specimens of it, there has 
been a deficiency of the variety that would exactly 
correspond to the Scottish Novels and the Irish 



CLASSIFICATION OF RECENT NOVELS. 225 

Novels, as just described. Seeing that the major- 
ity of the British Novelists since Scott have been 
Englishmen or Englishwomen, they have, of course, 
laid their scenes in England, and have, in a sense, 
made the delineation of English life and manners 
a professed part of their purpose. In this sense, 
Lady Caroline Lamb, Mr. Peacock, Theodore 
Hook, Mr. Plumer Ward, Mr. Disraeli, Sir Bulwer 
Lytton, Mrs. Gore, Mrs. Trollope, and, later still, 
Lady Blessington, Miss Martineau, Mr. Samuel 
Warren, Douglas Jerrold, Mrs. Crowe, Miss Jews- 
bury, Mr. Lewes, Mr. Shirley Brooks, Mrs. Marsh, 
Miss Mulock and others have all been novelists of 
English life — some of them continuing the exqui- 
site style of English domestic fiction which had 
been begun by Miss Austen, and othefs^ introduc- 
ing original peculiarities into the novel, and extend- 
ing its range farther over the surface; and more 
into the corners of English life. In their hands, 
however, or in the hands of most of them, the 
Novel of English life and manners has not had 
that express nationality of character which is found 
in the contemporary Scottish and Irish Novels. 
Whether from the very variety of life and manners 
over so broad a country as England — Yorkshire 
exhibiting one set of characteristics, Devonshire 
another, Kent and Sussex another, and so on ; or 
whether because what could be done in the way 



226 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

of a novel of national English characteristics had 
already been done to a sufficient extent by Field- 
ing and others of the eighteenth century, and 
there remained no such interest for British readers 
in that English system of life which was becoming 
the normal and conventional one for all, as in the 
outstanding bits of still unbooked barbaresque j^re- 
sented by Scotland and Ireland — certain it is 
that, in most of the novelists I have named, we 
have only a certain sublimation of English life, as 
presented, or supjDOsed to be presented, in the 
uppermost layers of society over the country at 
large, or as concentrated in London and its sub- 
urbs. In the tales of Miss Mitford, and in some 
of those of Theodore Hook, Mr. Peacock, and per- 
haps also of Sir Bulwer Lytton and some others, 
without taking into account Dickens and Thack- 
eray, I believe there are illustrations of English 
nature and life in their non-conventional and non- 
metropolitan varieties; and it is worthy of remark 
that of late this tendency to the illustration of the 
outstanding barbaresque and primitive in English 
society itself has been gaining strength. Miss 
Bronte made a refreshing innovation in English 
novel-writing when she drew her characters and 
scenes, and even portions of her dialect, from her 
native Yorkshire ; Mrs. Gaskell has followed with 
her pictures of artisan life, and her specimens of 



Classification of recent novels. 227 

provincial dialect in Lancashire ; and Mr. Kings- 
ley has broken ground, as an artist, in Devonshire 
and other counties. There are rich fields of yet 
unbooked English life both in northern and in 
southern England ; and the literary centralization 
of English life in London has been owing, perhaps, 
to the centralization of the literary craft itself 
there. 

Out of this centralization, however, there has 
sprung (4) The Fashionable Novel, as it has 
been called, which aims at describing life as it 
goes on in the aristocratic portions of London so- 
ciety, and in the portions immediately connected 
with these. Belgravia, Mayfair, and the West 
End of London generally are the topographical 
seats of this kind of Novel — saving, of course, 
that at Christmas, and after the Opera and Parlia- 
mentary season, the lords, baronets, ladies, wits, 
and footmen, who figure in them, are dispersed 
into the country, or even as far as Scotland and the 
Continent. Representatives of this style of novel, 
are Lady Caroline Lamb, Theodore Hook again, 
Mr. Disraeli, Sir Bulwer Lytton again, Mrs. Gore, 
Mrs. TroUope, Lady Blessington, etc. But another 
kind of Novel, also perhaps the result of the same 
centralization of literary attention on the metrop- 
olis, has been (5) The Illustrious Criminal 
Novel, of which the most celebrated specimens 



228 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

have been Sir Bulwer Lyttoh's Paul Clifford^ and 
Mr. Ains worth's JacJc Sliei^pard. I need hardly 
say that this kind of novel, though dealing with 
roguery and criminal adventure, is by no means* 
the same as that exemplified by Fielding in his 
"Jonathan Wild," or as the Spanish picaresque 
novels, or even as Defoe's illustrations of outlaw 
life in his day. 

But Fiction gets tired of having its attention 
fixed on the Metropolis, just as [N'ovelists get tired 
of living in it ; and hence, by way of variety, we 
have had w^hat may be called (6) The Travel- 
ler's Novel, the nature of which is that we are 
taken in it beyond the British Islands, usually in 
the train of "fashionable" people, and are made 
to roam over the Continent, or to reside in Paris, 
or at German spas, or in Florence, or other Italian 
cities. In most of the Fashionable Novels we 
have something of this ; but several of the novels 
of Sir Bulwer Lytton, and more still of Mrs. 
Gore's and Mrs. Trollope's, belong in a special 
manner to the class now designated. Mr. Thack- 
eray also, after his peculiar fashion, will now and 
then take us, with the Kickleburys or some other 
English family, up the Rhine. Varieties of the 
Traveller's Novel, worthy of being separately 
classed, are (7 and 8) The Novel of American- 
Manners AND Society, — of which Mrs. Trollope, 



CLASSIFICATION OF RECENT NOVELS. 229 

Captain Marry at, and, to some extent, also Mr. 
Dickens and Mr. Thackeray, have given ns speci- 
mens, — and The Oriental Novel, or Novel of 
Eastern Manners and Society, of which we 
have had specimens in the Persian and Indian 
novels of Mr. Morier, Mr. Bailie Fraser, and others. 
These two kinds of Novel, in as far as they lead 
us, in a right spirit, over new regions of natural 
scenery and new social fields, are by no means 
unimportant. 

I may name as two additional kinds of Novel, 
in which the interest also arises, in a great degree, 
from imaginary locomotion (9 and 10), The Mil- 
itary Novel and The Naval Novel — the first 
represented in such stories of military life and 
adventure as those of Mr. Gleig, MrT Maxwell, 
Mr. Lever, and, more incidentally, in parts of 
Thackeray's fictions ; the second in the sea sto- 
ries of Captain Marryat, Ca^^tain Chamier, Mr. 
James Hannay, Mr. Cupples, and others. In some 
of these naval novels of later times, besides much 
of the interest to be found in such older sea novels 
as those of Smollett, arising from the representa- 
tion of sailor characters and the incidents and hu- 
mors of ship life, whether as packed up on board 
ship, or as let loose, to the discomfiture of lands- 
men, in port towns, there is much of another sort 
of interest, not found in Smollett's sea stories, and 
20 



230 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

indeed alien to the literature of that day, — the 
interest arising from the poetry of the sea itself, 
and from the relations of the hearty fellows, not 
only to each other in the gun-room and mess-room, 
but also to the vast element on which they float, 
and to the clouds that scud and the hurricanes 
that blow over the wilderness of waters. In this 
conjunction of two sets of relations, — the relations 
of the men to each other as mdividuals of the same 
crew, pursuing their voyage together, and the rela- 
tions of the crew as a whole to the visible infinity 
in which they pursue their voyage, through which 
fly the omens which they mark, and over which 
hover and shriek the demons which they dread, — 
the sailor's life is typical, poetically, of human life in 
the general. Something of this notion has caught 
some of our later sea novelists ; and it is not now 
only the jealousies and the practical jokes of the 
mess-room that they give us, but the superstitions 
also of the man at the wheel, or the yarns of the 
old sailors whiling away the calm of a starry night, 
and exchanging the wild ideas of their marine reli- 
gion, or the sceiie when all hands are on deck and 
the captain's voice is heard amid the storm, or 
when the ship is cleared for action, and Jack 
stands, no longer slouching and comical, but calm 
and magnificent, his breast and arms bare, the 



CLASSIFICATION OF RECENT NOVELS. 231 

cannon levelled, and his match already at the 
touch-hole. 

But, while we have had novels of real action 
and adventure of all kinds, there have not been 
wanting specimens, at least, of (11) The Novel of 
Supernatural Phantasy. Mrs. Shelley's Frank- 
enstein^ and Bulwer Lytton's Zanoni^ are of this 
class ; and there are one or two of Douglas Jer- 
rold's tales, as well as of Dickens's Christmas 
Stories, in which there is a poetic use of ghostly 
agency. Nor have there been wanting specimens 
of (12) what may be called The Art and Cul- 
ture Novel, in which the purpose is to exhibit 
the growth and education of an individual char- 
acter of the more thoughtful order. By far the 
greatest example of this species of fiction in mod- 
ern literature is the "Wilhelm Meister" of Goe- 
the ; and there can be no doubt that that work, 
since it was translated, has had some influence on 
the aims of British novel-writing. Indeed, what 
is best in our fashionable novels seems to have 
arisen from an occasional desire, on the j)art of 
those who practise such a style of fiction, to make 
it subserve some such purpose. Some of Bulwer's 
novels are, perhaps, the nearest approach, in de- 
sign, to the Art and Culture Novel that have been 
yet noticed among us ; but I do not know that we 
have yet, or, at all events, that we have had till 



232 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

very recently, any very pure specimens of the 
novel so designated. 

All this while, as you will already have assured 
yourselves, we have by no means lost sight of (13) 
The Histokical Novel, to which the genius of 
Scott gave, while he lived, such vigor and predom- 
inance. Since the impulse which Scott gave to the 
historical variety of prose fiction, we have had his- 
torical novels in great, and Wen increasing, abun- 
dance. We have had Scotch historical novels of 
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from Gait, 
and romances of still older j^eriods of Scottish his- 
tory from Sir Thomas Dick Lauder and others ; 
we 'have had Irish historical novels from some of 
the Irish novelists already mentioned ; and, in ex- 
tension of Scott's few, but splendid, inroads ujDon 
national English History, we have had English his- 
torical novels from Godwin, from Sir Bulwer Lyt- 
ton (witness his Harold and his Last of the Bar- 
ons)^ from Horace Smith, from Mr. Ainsworth, 
and, above all, from Mr. G. P. R. James. Mr. 
Kingsley, also, has ventured on this field afresh 
in his Westward Ho! ; nay, Mr. Thackeray, too, 
in his Esmond^ and Mr. Dickens in his Barnahy 
Budge., where he describes the Gordon Riots. In 
the field of Continental History, broken in upon 
by Scott in his " Quentin Durward" and his "Anne 
of Geierstein," James has had a realm to himself, 



CLASSIFICATION OF RECENT NOVELS. 233 

save for such an occasional intrusion as that of Bul- 
wer Lytton in his Bienzi. It is observable also, 
that, though Scott's passion for the historical con- 
fined itself to the Gothic period of the European 
past, the taste for the historical in fiction, or for the 
fictitious in history, which he fostered, has, since his 
time, overflowed the Gothic area altogether, and 
extended beyond it, both chronologically and geo- 
graphically. Chronologically — for have we not 
had fictions of Classical History in Lockhart's Val- 
erius^ a Boman Story, in Bulwer's Zast Days of 
Pompeii, in Mr. Wilkie Collins's Ant07iinus, in 
Kings-ley's Bypatia, and in others still more an- 
cient in their reference? Geographically — for, 
besides the novels of oriental society and manners 
already alluded to, have we not novels-of oriental 
history ? Of these the most celebrated, I believe, 
is Hope's Anastasiiis, or 'Memoirs of a Modern 
Greek, written at the close of the Eighteenth Cen- 
tury, It is sufficient to say of this novel, which 
is a description of the decrepit society of the Turk- 
ish Empire at the time indicated by the title, that 
some critics, including Baron Bunsen, praise it as 
of deeper epical import than any of Scott's. 

I have thus enumerated, by way of rough and 
obvious, rather than considered and thorough clas- 
•sification, thirteen distinct varieties of the British 

20* 



234 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

novel, as in existence during the quarter of a cen- 
tury after Scott's influence had begun, and as in 
existence still. The classification, such as it is, has 
been made on external grounds, with reference to 
the different kinds of object-matter handled in the 
novels. Had the classification been according to 
the different notions or styles of art employed in 
the treatment of the object-matter, whatever its 
kind, fewer heads might haYe sufficed. Thus, Sir 
Bulwer Lytton classifies all novels into the three 
kinds of the Familiar, the Picturesque, and the In- 
tellectual, — not a very scientific classification, but 
one which has an obvious meaning. Whichever 
classification we use, — whether the external one, 
according to the matter, or the internal one, ac- 
cording to the style of treatment, — Sir Bulwer 
Lytton himself may carry ofi* the palm from all his 
coevals in respect of versatility. Take his own 
classification, according to styles of treatment, and 
he has given us Novels Famihar, Novels Pictu- 
resque, and Novels Intellectual. Take the other 
classification, according to the kinds of matter 
treated, and he has given us novels ranking under 
at least seven of the thirteen heads enumerated — 
to wit, the Novel of English Manners, the Fashion- 
able Novel, the Novel of Illustrious Villainy, the 
Traveller's Novel, the Novel of Supernatural Phan- 
tasy, the Art and Culture Novel, and the Histori- 



THE FASHIONABLE NOVEL. 235 

cal Novel. I say nothing of any other of Bul- 
wer's merits besides this of his versatility, save 
that, of all British novelists, he seems to have 
worked most consciously on a theory of the Novel 
as a form of literature. This, indeed, may be the 
very cause of his versatility. 

Of all the kinds of novel that I have mentioned, 
perhaps the most characteristic product of the time 
was, and is, the Fashionable Novel. I think we 
shall agree that this very popular form of fiction 
may now very safely be dispensed with — that no 
harm would attend its total and immediate extinc- 
tion. Not that the classes of society whose feelings 
and doings this form of fiction professes to repre- 
sent are classes whose feelings and doings are un- 
important or uninteresting. Far from-4t; No one 
can be in any place where the members of these 
classes are gathered together, without feeling that, 
behind those faces, fresh or pale, haggard or beauti- 
ful, there are brains at Avork, more active than the 
average, and that those hearts, male or female, have 
their passions and their histories. Let whosoever 
is qualified tell forth the peculiar experience of 
those classes in any serious form that may be possi- 
ble ; and let what is ridiculous or despicable among 
them live under the terror of Michael Angelo Tit- 
marsh. But in the Fashionable Novel, commonly 
so called, there is no sort of information at all. 



236 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

There is no soundness in it. Human life there is 
all resolved into that one interest, into which, as we 
are told, things had resolved themselves also in the 
world before the Flood — the interest of marrying 
and giving in marriage. One could almost wish 
for another Flood, if that would put an end to it. 
At all events, let us throw all the cold water upon it 
that we ourselves can. For, so far as other inter- 
ests are bound up, in the Fashionable Novel, with 
that primary and fundamental one, the effect is but 
to add to the silliness, to make the frivolity more 
mischievous. In most Fashionable Novels, for ex- 
ample, there is a dash of politics. The two Houses 
of Parliament are appendages to that Vanity Fair 
in which the ladies and gentlemen move ; and, so 
far as the gentlemen have any occupation in ad- 
dition to flirtation, it is in the function of legisla- 
ting for their country. The veteran baronet goes 
to the Commons after dinner, or retires to his blue- 
books ; the young hero aspires to the representa- 
tion of the county and a futurity as a Pitt or a 
Canning ; changes of ministry and dissolutions are 
parts of the machinery of the novel; and always 
at some point of the story there are the humors of 
an Election. These things are in our social life, 
and represented they must be in our fictions, like 
any other social facts, and in full proportion ; but, 
represented as they are in our Fashionable Novels 



THE FASHIONABLE NOVEL. 237 

— why, it is catering for revolution ! Parliament 
an appendage to Vanity Fair ; legislation a relief 
from flirtation ; those figm*es of gentlemen and la- 
dies moving about in their charmed circle, and 
having their destinies, and the chances of their 
marriages affected by votes, changes of ministry, 
and dissolutions — why, where on earth, all this 
time, in the Fashionable Novelist's imagination, is 
the thing called the Country ? Nay, and if there is 
serious political talk for a page or two, what talk it 
is! So and so — such and such a minister — "plays 
his cards well ! " That is the phrase. Plays his 
cards well ! Is Government, then, card-playing ? 
In a sense, it may be ; for the suit is diamonds, and 
spades are the agricultural interest, and hearts, too, 
have to be played with, and if politicsTs long con- 
sidered card-playing, it may all end in clubs. 

One of the best passages in Bleak House is a 
passage satirizing in real life that mode of talking 
about politics as an amusement of "fashionable" 
persons, which has reproduced itself in the Fashion- 
able Novel. It is an account of the talk that went 
on at the Dedlock family mansion of Chesney Wold 
amid the guests there assembled — the chief collo- 
quists being Lord Boodle and Mr. Buffy. 

" He (Lord Boodle) perceives with astonisliment that, suppos- 
ing the present government to be overthrown, the limited choice 



238 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

of the Crown in the fonnation of a new ministiy would lie be- 
tween Lord Goodie and Sir Thomas Doodle — supposing it to he 
impossible for the Duke of Foodie to act with Goodie; which 
may be assumed to be the case, in consequence of the breach 
arising out of that affair with Hoodie. Then, giving the Home 
Department and the leadership of the House of Gommons to 
Joodle, the Exchequer to Koodle, the Golonies to Loodle, and 
the Foreign Office to Moodle, what are you to do with Noodle ? 
You can't offer him the Presideiiey; of the Gouncil; that is 
reserved for Poodle! You can't put him in the Woods and 
Forests; that is hardly good enough for Quoodle! What fol- 
lows? That this country is shipwrecked, lost, and gone to 
pieces, because you can't provide for Noodle ! 

"On the other hand, the Right Honorable William Buffy, 
M. P., contends across the table with some one else, that the 
shipwnreckof the country — of which there is no doubt; it is 
only the manner of it that is in question — is attributable to 
Cuify. If you had done with Cuffy what you ought to have 
done when he first came into Parliament, and had prevented 
him from going over to Duffy, you would have got him into an 
alliance with Fuffy; you would have had with you the weight 
attaching as a smart debater to Guffy; you would have brought 
to bear upon the elections the wealth of Huffy; you would 
have got in for three counties Jufly, Kuffy, and Luffy; and you 
would have strengthened your administration by the official 
knowledge and business-habits of Muffy! All this instead 
of being, as you now are, dependent on the mere caprice of 
Puffy!'' 



DICKENS AND THACKERAY. 239 

Need I read more ? If satire could annihilate 
nonsense, would not the Boodle and Buffy style of 
politics — which is very much that of our Fashion- 
able Novels — have been by this time beyond the 
moon ? 

Prose Fiction in Britain — nay, in the rest of 
Europe and in America too — has received a fresh 
impulse, and has taken on a new set of character- 
istics, since Dickens and Thackeray became, for 
us, its chief representatives. These two writers 
belong to the classic roll ; they are now in their 
living activity, and the buzz of critics is about 
them ; but a time will come when they shall have 
their settled places, and, the buzz having trans- 
ferred itself to others whose turn of penance it 
will then be, they shall be seen in theTr full pro- 
portions relatively to the Fieldings and Smolletts 
and Sternes that went before them, and men, not- 
ing their differences in comparison with these, 
may assert also, more boldly than we, what shall 
seem their superiorities. Dickens, as you are 
aware, was the first in the field. His Sketches by 
Boz appeared in 1837 followed, within the next 
ten years, by his Pickioick^ his Nicholas Nicldeby^ 
his Oliver Ticist (previously published in maga- 
zine parts), his Humphrey'' s Clock (including The 
Old Curiosity Shop and Barnahy Budge), his 
Martin Chuzzlewit^ and several of his Christmas 



240 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

Stories. It was not till after these ten years of 
Dickens's established popularity, or till about the 
year 1847, that Mr. Thackeray — whose extraor- 
dinary powers had already, however, been long 
recognized within a limited circle of intellectual 
men, in virtue of his numerous scattered publica- 
tions and papers — stepped forth into equally 
extensive celebrity. His Vanity Fair was the 
first efficient proclamation tqjthe public at large of 
the existence of this signal British talent, increas- 
ingly known since by the republication of those 
Miscellanies which had been buried in magazines 
and other periodicals, and by the successive tri- 
umphs of the Snob Papers^ Pendennis, Esmond^ 
the N'ewcotnes^ and various Christmas Books. 
Parallel with these had been running later fictions 
from Mr. Dickens's pen — Doynhey and 8on^ Pavid 
Copperfield^ and Bleah House. Mr. Dickens also 
had the last word in his Little Porrit, until the 
other' day, when Mr. Thackeray recommenced in 
his Yirginia7is. For, with the two writers, accord- 
ing to the serial system, it seems to be, whether 
by arrangement or by necessity, as with Castor 
and Pollux ; both cannot be above the horizon of 
the publishing world at once, and when the one 
is there, the other takes his turn in Tartarus. 
But whether simultaneously visible or alternate, 
the two are now so closely associated in the public 



DICKENS AND THACKERAY. 241 

mind, that whenever the one is mentioned the other 
is thought of. It is now Dickens and Thackeray, 
Thackeray and Dickens, all the world over. Nay, 
not content with associating them, people have 
got into the habit of contrasting them and naming 
them in opposition to each other. There is a 
Dickens fiction, and there is a Thackeray faction ; 
and there is no debate more common, wherever 
literary talk goes on, than the debate as to the 
respective merits of Dickens and Thackeray. 

Perhaps there is a certain ungraciousness in our 
thus always comparing and contrasting the two 
writers. We ought to be but too glad that we 
have such a pair of contemporaries, yet living and 
in their prime, to cliecr on against each other. I 
felt this strongly once when I saw the two men 
together. The occasion was historic. It was in 
June, 1857; the place was Norwood Cemetery. 
\ multitude had gathered there to bury a man 
known to both of them, and who had known both 
of them well — a man whom we have had inci- 
dentally to name as holding a place, in some 
respects peculiar, in the class of writers to which 
they belong, though his most effective place was 
in a kindred department of literature ; a man, too, 
of whom I will say that, let the judgment on his 
remaining writings be permanently what it may, 
and let tongues have spoken of him this or that 
21 



242 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

awry, there breathed not, to my knowledge, within 
the unwholesome bounds of what is specially Lon- 
don, any one in whose actual person there was 
more of the pith of energy at its tensest, of that 
which in a given myriad anywhere distinguishes 
the one. How like a little Nelson he stood, dash- 
ing back his hair, and quivering for the verbal 
combat ! The flash of his wit, in which one qual- 
ity the island had not his match, was but the man- 
ifestation easiest to be observed of a mind com- 
pact of sense and information, and of a soul gen- 
erous and on fire. And now all that remained of 
Jerrold was enclosed within the leaden coffin 
which entered the cemetery gates. As it passed, 
one saw Dickens among the bearers of the pall, 
his uncovered head of genius stooped, and the 
wind blowing his hair. Close behind came Thack- 
eray ; and, as the slow procession wound up th^ 
hill to the chapel, the crowd falling into it in twos 
and threes and increasing its length, his head was 
to be seen by the later ranks, towering far in the 
front above all the others, like that of a marching 
Saul. And so up to the little chapel they moved ; 
and, after the service for the dead, down again to 
another slope of the hill, where, by the side of one 
of the walks, and opposite to the tombstone of 
Blanch ard, Jerrold' s grave was open. There the 
last words were read ; the coffin was lowered ; and 



DICKENS AND THACKERAY. 243 

the two, among hundreds of others, looked down 
their farewell. And so, dead at the age of fifty- 
four, Jerrold was left in his solitary place, where 
the rains were to fall, and the nights were to roll 
overhead, and but now and then, on a summer's 
day, a chance stroller would linger in curiosity; 
and back into the roar of London dispersed the 
funeral crowd. Among those remitted to the liv- 
ing were the two of whom we speak, aged, the 
one forty-five, the other forty-six. Why not be 
thankful that the great city had two such men 
still known to its streets; why too curiously insti- 
tute comparisons between them ? 

And yet, in instituting such comparisons, the 
public are guided by a right critical instinct. 
There can be no doubt that the two writers bring 
out and throw into relief each other's peculiarities^ 
— that they are, in some respects, the opposites of 
each other ; and that each is most accurately stud- 
ied when his difierences from the other are noted 
and scrutinized. 

But, first, as to their general resemblances. 
Both novelists belong, in the main, though by no 
means exclusively, to the order of Humorists, or 
writers of Comic Fiction. Moreover, under this 
distinction, both stand very much in the same 
relation to their predecessors in respect of the 
kind or kinds of fiction, previously in use, to which 



244 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

they have attached themselves, and in respect of 
the extension of range which that kind or those 
kinds of fiction have received at their hands. The 
connections of both at first were chiefly with that 
which we have distinguished as the Novel of Eng- 
lish Life and Manners ; and both, in working this 
kind of Novel, have added immensely to its 
achievements and capabilities in one particular 
field — that of the Metropo'liS. The Novels of 
Dickens and Thackeray are, most of them, novels 
of London ; it is in the multifarious circumstance 
of London life, and its j)eculiar humors, that they 
move most frequently and have their most charac- 
teristic being ; — a fact not unimportant in the 
appreciation of both. As the greatest aggregate 
of human beings on the face of the earth, as a 
population of several millions crushed together in 
one dense mass on a space of a few square miles 
— this mass consisting, for the most part, of Eng- 
lishmen, but containing also as many Scotchmen 
as there are in Edinburgh, as many Irishmen as 
there are in Dublin, and a perfect Polyglott of 
other nations in addition — London is as good an 
epitome of the world as anywhere exists, present- 
ing all those phenomena of interest, whether seri- 
ous or humorous, which result from great numbers, 
heterogeneousness of composition, and close social 
packing; besides which, as the metropolis of the 



DICKENS AND THACKERAY. 245 

British Empire, it is the centre whither all the 
sensations of the Empire tend, and whence the 
motive currents issue that thrill to the extremities. 
If any city could generate and sustain a species of 
Novel entirely out of its own resources, it might 
surely be London ; nor would ten thousand novels 
exhaust it. After all the mining efforts of pre- 
vious novelists in so rich a field, Dickens and 
Thackeray have certainly sunk new shafts in it, 
and have come upon valuable veins not previously 
disturbed. So much is this the case that, without 
injustice to Fielding and others, Dickens and 
Thackeray might well be considered as the found- 
ers of a peculiar sub-variety of the Novel of Eng- 
lish I^ife and Manners, to be called " The British 
Metropolitan Novel." As Londoners, however, 
do not always stay in London, or, while in Lon- 
don, are not always engrossed by what is passing 
there, so our two novelists both range, and range 
about equally, beyond the bounds of the kind of 
fiction thus designated. They do give us Eng- 
lish life and manners out of London; nay, they 
have both, as we have seen, given us specimens 
also of their ability in at least two varieties of the 
Novel distinct from that of Eno^lish life and man- 
ners — the Traveller's Novel, and the Historical 
Novel. If, in this respect of external range, either 
has the advantage, it is perhaps Dickens — who, 
21* 



246 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

in his Christmas stories, and in stories interspersed 
through his larger fictions, has given us specimens 
of his skill in a kind of prose phantasy wliich 
Thackeray has not attemi^ted. 

In addition to the difference just indicated, 
critics have pointed out, or readers have discov- 
ered for themselves, not a few other differences 
between Dickens and Thackeray. 

In the mere matter of litetary style, there is a 
very obvious difference. Mr. Thackeray, accord- 
ing to the general opinion, is the more terse and 
idiomatic, and Mr. Dickens the more diffuse and 
luxuriant writer. There is an Horatian strictness 
and strength in Thackeray which satisfies the most 
cultivated taste, and wins the respect of the sever- 
est critic; but Dickens, if he is the more rapid 
and careless on the whole, seems more susceptible 
to passion, and rises to a keener and wilder song. 
Keferring the difference of style to its origin in 
difference of intellectual' constitution, critics are 
accustomed to say that Thackeray's is the mind 
of closer and harder, and Dickens the mind of 
looser and richer texture — that the intellect of 
the one is the more penetrating and reflective, and 
that of the other the more excursive and intuitive. 

Passing to the substance of their novels, as com- 
posed of incident, description, and character, we 
are able to give more definiteness to the popularly 



DICKENS AND THACKERAY. 247 

felt diiferences between the two novelists in this 
respect, by attending to the analogies between 
novel-writing and the art of painting. In virtue 
of his descriptions, or imaginations of scenery, the 
Novelist may be considered along with Landscape 
and Object painters ; and, in virtue of his char- 
acters and his incidents, along with Figure and 
Action painters. So, on the whole, we find the 
means of indicating a novelist's range and pecu- 
liarities by having recourse to the kindred craft 
for names and terms. On this plan we should 
have to say that, while both our novelists are 
masterly artists, the art of Dickens is the wider 
in its range as to object and circumstance. I 
may here use a sentence or two on this subject 
which I wrote for another occasion^ — "Dickens," 
I then said " can give you a landscape proper — 
a piece of the rural English earth in its summer 
or in its winter dress, with a bit of water and a 
village spire in it ; he can give you, what painters 
seldom attempt, a great patch of flat country by 
night, with the red trail of a railw^ay-train trav- 
ersing the darkness ; he can succeed in a sea-piece ; 
he can describe the crowded quarter of a city, or 
the main street of a country town, by night or by 
day ; he can paint a garden, sketch the interior of 
a cathedral, or photograph the interior of a hut or 
of a drawing-room ; he can even be minute in his 



248 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

delineations of single articles of dress or of furni- 
ture. Take liira again in the Figure department. 
Here he can be an animal painter, with Landseer, 
when he likes, as witness his dogs, ponies, and 
ravens ; he can be a historical painter, as witness 
his description of the Gordon Riots; he can be 
a caricaturist, like Leech ; he can give you a bit 
of village life with Wilkie; he can paint a hag- 
gard scene of low city life, so as to remind one 
of some of the Dutch artists, or a pleasant family 
scene, gay or sentimental, reminding one of Maclise 
or of Frank Stone ; he can body forth romantic 
conceptions of terror or beauty that have arisen in 
his imagination; he can compose a fantastic fairy 
piece ; he can even succeed in a dream or allegory, 
where the figures are hardly human. The range 
of Thackeray, on the other hand, is more restricted. 
In the landscape department, he can give you a 
quiet little bit of background, such as a park, a 
clump of trees, or the vicinity of a country house, 
w^ith a village seen in the sunset ; a London street 
also, by night or by day, is famiUar to his eye ; 
but, on the whole, his scenes are laid in those more 
habitual places of resort, where the business or the 
pleasure of aristocratic or middle-class society goes 
on — a pillared clubhouse in Pall Mall, the box or 
pit of a theatre, a brilliant reception-room in May- 
fair, a pubhc dancing-room, a newspaper office, a 



DICKENS AND THACKERAY. 249 

shop in Paternoster Row, the interior of a married 
man's house, or a bachelor's chambers in the Tem^ 
pie. And his choice of subjects from the life cor- 
responds. Men and women as they are, and as 
they behave daily in the charmed circles of rank, 
literature, and fashion, are the objects of Mr. 
Thackeray's pencil ; and in his delineations of 
them, he seems to unite the strong and fierce 
characteristics of Hogarth, with a touch both of 
Wilkie and Maclise, and not a little of that regu- 
lar grace and bloom of coloring which charm us 
in the groups of Watteau." Within his range, the 
merit of superior care, clearness, and finish, may be 
assigned to Thackeray ; but there are passages in 
Dickens — such as the description of the storm on 
the East Coast in his Copperfield — to which, for 
visual weirdliness, there is nothing comparable in 
the pages of his rival. 

As to the difference of ethical spirit, or of gen- 
eral philosophy, between the two writers, the public 
have come to a very definite conclusion. Dick- 
ens, it is said, is the more genial, kindly, cheerful, 
and sentimental; Thackeray, the more harsh, 
caustic, cynical, and satirical writer. And, pro- 
ceeding on this distinction, the two factions argue, 
consistently with it, in behalf of their respective 
favorites — the adherents of Dickens objecting to 
what they call Thackeray's merciless views of 



250 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

human life, and his perception of the mean at the 
roots of everything ; and the adherents of Thack- 
eray, on the other hand, maintaining the whole- 
some effect of his bracing sense in comparison 
with what they call Dickens's sickly sentimental- 
ism. For us, joining neither of the factions, it is 
enough to recognize the fact of the difference on ■ 
which they argue so constantly. The philosophy 
of Dickens certainly is th^professed philosophy 
of Idndliness, of a genial interest in all things great 
and small, of a light English jayousness, and a 
sunny universal benevolence ; whereas, though I 
do not agree with those that represent Thacke- 
ray's writings as mainly cynical, but think that, in 
such characters as his Warrington, he has shown 
his belief in manly nobleness, and his j^ower of 
representing it — yet it seems clear that the per- 
vading philosoj^hy of his writings, far more than 
those of Dickens, is that of a profoundly reasoned 
pococurantism, of a skeptical acquiescence in the 
world as it is ; or, to use his own words in describ- 
ing the state of mind of his hero Pendennis, "of a 
belief, qualified with scorn, in all things extant." 
The difference is perhaps best seen, and with most 
advantage to Thackeray, when it is exj)ressed neg- 
atively — that is, with reference not to what the 
two writers respectively inculcate, but to what 
they respectively attack and oppose. Stated so 



DICKENS AND THACKERAY. 251 

(but such a method of statement, it should be 
remembered, is not the fairest for all purposes), 
the philosophy of Dickens may be defined as Anti- 
Puritanism, whereas that of Thackeray may be 
defined as Anti-Snobbism. Whatever practice, 
institution, or mode of thinking is adverse, in Mr. 
Dickens's view, to natural enjoyment and festivity, 
against that he makes war; whereas that which Mr. 
Thackeray hunts out and hunts down everywhere 
is Snobbism. Although, in their positive forms, 
both philosophies are good, perhaps in their nega- 
tive applications Mr. Thackeray's is the least liable 
to exception. Anti-Snobbism, it may indeed be 
admitted, is not a perfect summary of the whole 
decalogue ; but, in the present day, and especially 
in and about London, it is that which most nearly 
passes for such a summary ; and, seeing that there 
is no question anywhere but that Snobbism is a 
bad thing, and little difficulty anywhere in know- 
ing what it is, Mr. Thackeray's doctrine is one to 
which there needs be less hesitation in wishing 
universal good speed than to the corresponding 
doctrine of his rival — a doctrine which would too 
hastily extinguish that, about the nature of which, 
and its proper varieties, there may well be much 
controversy. Farther, it is to Mr. Thackeray's 
advantage, in the opinion of many, that in his 
satires in behalf of Anti-Snobbism, or of any other 



252 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

doctrine that he may hold, it is men and their 
modes of thinking and acting that he attacks, and 
not social institutions. To do battle with the 
vanity, the affectation, the insincerity, the Snobb- 
ism, that lies under each man's own hat, and actu- 
ates each man's own gestures and conduct, is Mr. 
Thackeray's way; and rarely or never does he 
concern himself with social anomalies or abuses. 
In this respect he is singularly acquiescent and 
conservative for a man of such general strength of 
intellect. Mr. Dickens, on the other hand, is sin- 
gularly aggressive and oj^inionative. There is 
scarcely a social question on which he has not 
touched ; and there are few of his novels in which 
he has not blended the functions of a social and 
political critic with those of the artist, to a degree 
detrimental, as many think, to his genius in the 
latter capacity. For Mr. Dickens's wonderful 
powers of description are no guarantee for the 
correctness of his critical judgments in those par- 
ticulars to which he may apply them. "We may 
owe one degree of respect," I have said, " to Dick- 
ens, as the describer of Squeers and Creakle, and 
quite another degree of respect when he tells us 
how he would have boys educated. Mr. Spenlow 
may be a capital likeness of a Doctors' Commons 
lawyer; and yet this would not be the proper 
ground for concluding Mr. Dickens's view of a 



DICKENS AND THACKERAY. 253 

reform in the Ecclesiastical Courts to be right. 
JSTo man has given more picturesque illustrations 
of London criminal life ; yet he might not be 
equally trustworthy in his notions of i^rison-disci- 
pline. His Dennis, the hangman, is a j^owerfully 
conceived character; yet this is no reason for 
accepting his opinion on capital punishments." 
And yet, how much we owe to Mr. Dickens for 
this very opinion ativeness ! With his real shrewd- 
ness, his thoughtfulness, his courage, what noble 
hits he has made! The Administrative Reform" 
Association might have worked for ten years with- 
out producing half of the effect which Mr. Dickens 
has produced in the same direction, by flinging 
out the phrase, " The Circumlocution Office." He 
has thrown out a score of such j^hrases, equally 
efficacious for social reform,; and it matters little 
that some of them might turn out on inquiry to be 
ludicrous exaggerations. 

All these differences, however, between Dickens 
and Thackeray, and still others that might be 
jjointed out, resolve themselves into the one fun- 
damental difference, that they are artists of oppo- 
site schools. Thackeray is a novelist of what is 
called the Keal school; Dickens is a novelist of 
the Ideal, or Romantic school. (The terms Real 
and Ideal have been so run upon of late, that their 
repetition begins to nauseate ; but they must be 
22 



254 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

kept, for all that, till better equivalents are joro- 
videcl.) It is Thackeray's aim to represent life as 
it is actually and historically — men and women, 
as they are, in those situations in which they are 
usually placed, with that mixture of good and evil 
and of strength and foible which is to be found in 
their characters, and liable only to those incidents 
which are of ordinary occi^rrence. He will have 
no faultless characters, no demigods — nothing 
but men and brethren. And from this it results 
that, when once he has conceived a character, he 
works downwards and inwards in his treatment of 
it, making it firm and clear at all points in its rela- 
tions to hard fact, and cutting down, where neces- 
sary, to the very foundations. Dickens, on the 
other hand, with all his keenness of observation, is 
more light and poetic in his method. Having 
once caught a hint from actual fact, he generalizes 
it, runs away with this generalization into a cor- 
ner, and develops it there into a character to 
match ; which character he then transports, along 
with others similarly suggested, into a world of 
semi-fantastic conditions, where the laws need not 
be those of ordinary probability. He has charac- 
ters of ideal j^erfection and beauty, as well as of 
ideal ugliness and brutality — characters of a hu- 
man kind verging on the supernatural, as well as 
characters actually belonging to the supernatural. 



DICKENS AND THACKERAY. 255 

Even his situations and scenery often lie in a 
region beyond the margin of everyday hfe. Now, 
both kinds of art are legitimate ; and each writer 
is to be tried within his own kind by the success 
he has attained in it. Mr. Thackeray, I believe, 
is as perfect a master in his kind of art as is to be 
found in the whole series of British prose writers ; 
a man in whom strength of understanding, acquired 
knowledge of men, subtlety of perception, deep 
philosophic humor, and exquisiteness of literary 
taste, are combined in a degree and after a man- 
ner not seen in any known precedent. But the 
kinds of art are different; and I believe some 
injustice has been done to Mr. Dickens of late, by 
forgetting this when comparing him with his rival. 
It is as if we were to insist that all j^ainters should 
be of the school of Hogarth. The Ideal or Ro- 
mantic artist must be true to nature, as well as 
the Real artist ; but he may be true in a different 
fashion. He may take hints from Nature in her 
extremest moods, and make these hints the germs 
of creations fitted for a world projected imagina- 
tively beyond the real one, or inserted into the 
midst of the real one, and yet imaginatively 
moated round from it. Homer, Shakspeare, and 
Cervantes, are said to be true to nature ; and yet 
there is not one of their most pronounced charac- 
ters exactly such as ever was to be found, or ever 



256 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

will be found in nature — not one of them which 
is not the result of some suggestion snatched from 
nature, in one or other of her uttermost moments, 
and then carried away and developed in the void. 
The question with the Real artist, with respect to 
what he conceives, is, " How would this actually 
be in nature ; in what exact setting of surrounding 
particulars would it appear^ " and, with a view to 
satisfy himself on this question, he dissects, ob- 
serves, and recollects all that is in historical rela- 
tion to his conception. The question with the 
Ideal artist is, " What can be made out of this ; 
with what human conclusions, ends, and asjjira- 
tions can it be imaginatively interwoven, so that 
the whole, though attached to nature by its origin, 
shall transcend or overlie nature on the side of the 
230ssibly existent — the might, could, or should be, 
or the might, could, or should have been ? " All 
honor to Thackeray and the prose fiction of social 
reality ; but much honor, too, to Dickens, for main- 
taining among us, even in the realm of the light 
and the amusing, some representation in prose of 
that art of ideal phantasy, the total absence of 
which in the literature of any age would be a sign 
nothing short of hideous. The true objection to 
Dickens is, that his idealism tends too much to 
extravagance and caricature. It would be possi- 
ble for an ill-natured critic to go through all his 



DICKENS AND THACKERAY. 257 

works, and to draw out in one long column a list 
of their chief chai-acters, annexing in a parallel 
column the phrases or labels by which these char- 
acters are distinguished, and of which they are 
generalizations — the "There's some credit in being 
jolly here" of Mark Tapley; the "It isn't of the 
slightest consequence " of Toots ; the " Something 
will turn up" of Mr. Micawber, etc., etc. Even 
this, however, is a mode of art legitimate, I believe, 
in principle, as it is certainly most effective in fact. 
There never was a Mr. Micawber in nature, exactly 
as he appears in the pages of Dickens ; but Micaw- 
berism pervades nature through and through ; and 
to have extracted this quality from nature, embody- 
ing the full essence of a thousand instances of it 
in one ideal monstrosity, is a feat oTlnvention. 
From the incessant repetition by Mr. Dickens of 
this inventive process openly and without varia- 
tion, except in the results, the public have caught 
what is called his mannerism or trick ; and hence 
a certain recoil from his later writings among the 
cultivated and fastidious. But let any one observe 
our current table-talk or our current literature, 
and, despite this profession of dissatisfaction, and 
in the very circles where it most abounds, let him 
note how gladly Dickens is used, and how fre- 
quently his phrases, his fancies, and the names of 
his characters come in, as illustration, embellish- 
22* 



258 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTf. 

ment, proverb, and seasoning. Take any periodi- 
cal in which there is a severe criticism of Dickens's 
last publication ; and, ten to one, in the same peri- 
odical, and perhaps by the same hand, there will 
be a leading article, setting out with a quotation 
from Dickens that flashes on the mind of the 
reader the thought which the whole article is 
meant to convey, or containing some allusion to 
one of Dickens's characters which enriches the 
text in the middle and floods it an inch round 
with color and humor. Mr. Thackeray's writings 
also yield similar contributions of pithy sayings 
applicable to the occasions of common talk, and 
of typical characters serving the purpose of lumin- 
ous metonymy — as witness his Becky Sharps, his 
Fokers, his Captain Costigans, and his Jeameses ; 
but, in his case, OAving to his habit rather of close 
delineation of the complex and particular as nature 
presents it, than of rapid fictitious generalization, 
more of the total eflect, whether of admiration or 
of ethical instruction, takes place in the act of 
reading him. 

The imitations, direct and indirect, of Thackeray 
and Dickens are, I need not say, innumerable. It 
is owing to their extraordinary popularity that, 
while all those forms of the novel which I enumer- 
ated at the beginning of this discourse, are still in 



DICKENS AND THACKERAY. 259 

practice amongst us, such a preponderance has 
within the last few years been attained by what 
may be called the Metropolitan Comic Fiction, or 
the Novel of Cockney Fun — a kind of fiction 
which has degenerated in some hands into some- 
thing so frivolous that the sooner it ends the 
better. Of late years, however, there have been 
signs among us, I believe, of the rise of a new kind 
or of new kinds of novel-writing, differing not only 
from this wretched novel of metropolitan fun, but 
also from the estabhshed styles either of Dickens 
or of Thackeray. The change can hardly be as- 
signed to any particular year ; but it may be con- 
venient to date it from the eventful year 1848. 

If I am not mistaken, the year 1848 will have to 
be referred back to for several generations to come 
as an epoch commencing much in European his- 
tory. It was not only that then a wave of demo- 
cratic 'revolution passed over the face of Europe, 
overthrowing thrones and constitutionalizing for a 
moment absolute governments, and that this move- 
ment was followed by a reaction, apparently re- 
storing what had been cast down, but in reality 
leaving all out of equilibrium, and bequeathing a 
heritage of wars, the duration of which no one can 
calculate. It was that at this instant of political 
commotion, and involved in the commotion itself, 
partly as cause and partly as immediate effect, 



260 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

there was an outburst into the intellectual atmos- 
phere of Europe of a whole set of new ideas and 
speculations previously latent or in course of for- 
mation in individual minds, or within the precincts 
of philosophical schools, but then irrecoverably let 
loose into the general consciousness, to exist as so 
much theory, baulked of all j^^'ese^t realization, 
but on that very account elaborating itself more 
fiercely in meditation aind iV verbal controversy, 
and overhanging more visibly the social fabric on 
whose towers and foundations it means to topple 
down. It was not without significance, for ex- 
ample, that the short-lived French Republic of 
1848 called itself La Hepuhllque Democratique et 
Sociale. By the addition of the second adjective 
it was meant that the new Revolution proceeded 
on principles, and involved ends, which had not 
existed in the great prior Revolution of 1789 ; and 
that, in addition to the ideas of Liberty, Equality, 
and Fraternity, which that Revolution had pro- 
mulgated and formulized, this carried in it a set of 
ideas, excogitated since, and trenching more deeply 
upon established human arrangements — the ideas 
that had been forming themselves in the minds of 
Saint-Simonians, Fourierists, and other speculative 
Parisian sects, and that had assumed for their gen- 
eral designation the vague word Socialism. As- 
sociated with these novelties of Socialism which 



RECENT SPECULATIONS. 261 

were flung into the EuroiDcan atmosphere, chiefly 
from France, at the date under notice, were others, 
of difierent origin geographically — some capable 
of being comprehended under the same name as 
tending to radical social changes, others more 
purely speculative in form, and appertaining to the 
traditional questions and variations of theolog}^ 
Altogether, there mounted into the intellectual air 
of Europe, in or about the year 1848, an unusual 
quantity of speculation, that, with respect to the 
popular or general mind, might be called new ; 
and it still hangs there like a cloud. At every mo- 
ment in the world's history existing society has 
thus had hanging over it a certain accumulation of 
recent theory freighted with changes about to be 
precipitated ; but it may be questioned whether 
within human memory there has been a time when 
the accumulation was so large and various as at 
present. Take the Continent, and what do we see 
there ? As a flooring, still nothing else but the 
old Papal and Imperial organization which was 
concluded to be condemned long ago ; and over 
this flooring, in full march to and fro, populations 
who believe neither in Papacy nor in Empire. Or, 
let us look nearer home. Was there ever a time 
when Britain contained within it a greater mass of 
esoteric opinion at variance with existing profession 
and practice — when, if the entire population, and 



262 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

especially the leading men in it, were polled on 
oath as to their beliefs on matters most fmida- 
mental, a greater crowd would have to walk to the 
farther end ? It is not only our " representative 
institutions " that are at present on trial. 

Now, as all this has been represented in some 
degree in our popular literature, so it has been rep- 
resented, perhaps most distinctly of all, in our liter- 
ature of prose fiction. It is in the nature of this 
species of literature, as I have already said, to take 
a more poAverful hold than Verse can do of those 
eddies of current fact and opinion, as distinct from 
the steadier undercourse of things, which, in the 
language of those who look more to the eddies 
than to the undercurrent, constitute a social crisis ; 
and, if so, then, whether in attending to the eddies, 
or in trying to dive, with epic Verse, down to the 
undercurrent, the Novel of the present has and 
may have plenty of work. My acquaintance with 
the British novels of the last ten years is not suf- 
ficiently detailed to make me sure that I can indi- 
cate all the tendencies of our novel-writing discern- 
ible since the time when Dickens and Thackeray 
were in divided possession of the field, or even 
that I can cite the instances that would best illus- 
trate the tendencies which I do indicate ; but, with 
allowance for these defects, the following observa- 
tions may pass as true : 



REALISM IN RECENT NOVELS. 263 

(1 ) In the first place, and generally, I think it is 
to be perceived that of late — and this to a great 
extent from the influence of Mr. Thackeray's ex- 
ample — there has been a growth among our novel- 
writers of a wholesome spirit of Realism. To 
borrow a phrase from a kindred art, a spirit of 
conscious Pre-Raphaelitism has invaded this spe- 
cies of literature. Not that here, any more than 
in our metrical poetry, or in the art of painting 
itself, the practice of those special merits which 
are now signalized by the term Pre-Raphaelitism 
is new. As there were painters who painted truly, 
minutely, and carefully, before Pre-Raphaelitism 
was heard of; as Wordsworth long ago preached 
a revolution in Poetry akin to that which the Pre- 
Raphaelites have advocated in painting; and as 
Crabbe practised long ago in his verse a Pre-Ra- 
phaelitism of the harder sort, — so among our nov- 
elists there have never been wanting examples of 
the most persevering and painstaking accuracy. 
Richardson, Fielding, and Miss Austen, certainly 
painted from the life. Of late, however, there 
seems to have been, among our practitioners of 
the novelist's art, a more general and conscious 
cultivation of the virtue inculcated in Pre-Raphael- 
itism — shown, first, in the more resolute and care- 
ful attention of novelists to facts and characters 
lying within the range of their own easy observa- 



264 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

tion ; secondly, in a disposition to go in search of 
facts and characters lying somewhat beyond that 
range, as painters carry their easel into unfamiliar 
localities ; and, thirdly, in a greater indifference to 
traditional ideas of beauty, and an increased will- 
ingness to accept, as worthy of study and repre- 
sentation, facts and objects accounted common, dis- 
agreeable, or even painful, vjn illustration, I may 
refer again to the representations of previously 
unexplored tracts of provincial EngUsh scenery, 
and life in the novels of Miss Bronte, Mrs. Gas- 
kell. Miss Mulock and others — to the minute spe- 
ciality with which in these novels physiognomies 
and places are described ; the range which they 
take among the different professions, crafts, and 
classes of society, as each possessing its peculiar 
habits and cast of thinking ; and the use in them 
all, when occasion serves, of the local dialect or of 
racy provincialisms. It is as if, proceeding on the 
theory that the British Novel, in its totality, should 
be a Natural History of British life, individual nov- 
elists were acting farther on the principle of subdi- 
vision of labor, and working out separately the 
natural histories of separate counties and parishes. , 
With Thackeray presiding in the centre, as direc- 
tor of the metropohtan museum, and observer-in- 
chief of the Middlesex district, though w^ith the 
liberty of an excursion hither and thither as he 



REALISM IN RECENT NOVELS. 2G5 

chooses, there are scores of others at work gather- 
ing facts, specially in Berkshire, Yorkshire, Lanca- 
shire, etc., some of them with the talent of accom- 
plished masters in the whol6 field of the science. 
Sir Bulwer Lytton has not disdained, in his more 
recent novels, to ply the functions of a quiet nat- 
uralist ; and at this moment readers are hailing the 
advent of a new artist of the real school, in the 
author of Adam Bede. 

In that kind of Natural History, however, which 
may thus form the business of the N'ovel, a lar- 
ger proj^ortion of the phenomena are phenomena 
purely of the present than in Natural History 
proper. The mineralogy, the botany, the zoology 
of Britain, or of its districts, are tolerably constant 
from year to year, so that laborers in these depart- 
ments apply their successive efforts to an accumu- 
lation already nearly fixed ; and even in the more 
varying annual meteorology the variations from 
year to year are not so great as they seem. In 
those facts, on the other hand, to which the Nov- 
elist with analogous aims has to direct his atten- 
tion, the rate of vicissitude is rapid. Human 
nature comes down the same in its essentials; 
customs and institutions are also perpetuated from 
generation to generation; but over this tolerably 
solid basis there rolls in every generation an 
assemblage of facts, psychological and political, 
23 



266 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

held in the meantime in vital solution and sus- 
pense, as the immediate element in which the gen- 
eration breathes, though soon also to fall down as 
sediment, a thin additional layer to the stratifica- 
tion foregone. Yet, as we are now regarding the 
Novel, it is precisely to these purely contemporary 
facts — these "humors" of the present, as Ben 
Jonson used to call them-^that the N^ovelist is 
supposed to owe his closest attention. It is the 
tendency of Realistic art — as commonly defined, 
at all events — to direct attention very particu- 
larly to all such circumstances of contemporary 
interest. Hence, to the full extent to which the 
operation of this kind of Naturalism in art has 
prevailed in British novel- writing during the last 
ten years, we observe an influx into British novels 
of those very sorts of circumstance which the 
decade itself has so j^lentifully generated. Not 
only have the actual movements and occurrences 
in Europe during these ten years — the Parisian 
Revolution of 1848, the Hungarian and Italian 
wars, the Crimean war, etc. — served as definite 
events with which to associate fictitious incidents ; 
but there has been a determination also to ideal 
incidents and situations of the order of those his- 
torically recent — political conspiracies, club-meet- 
ings, strikes in the manufacturing districts, mill 
riots, etc.; while, as additions to the novelist's 



REALISM IN RECENT NOVELS. 267 

traditionary stock of ideal characters, we have 
had the Socialist, the Red Republican, the For- 
eign Refugee, the Government Spy, the young 
Chartist Orator, the Emancipated Woman, and 
the like. In especial, within Britain, there has 
been a determination to make representatives of 
all classes of clergymen and of all religious creeds 
sit for their photographs in Novels — the Jesuit 
priest, the Roman Catholic pervert, the High- 
Church parson, the Broad-Church parson, the 
Low-Church parson, Curates of all the varieties, 
the Dissenting Preacher, the Methodist, the Uni- 
tarian, the Philosof)hical Skeptic, the Spiritualist, 
the Positivist, and even the Mormonite. In proof 
of the tendency of the Novel thus jto pluck its 
materials out of the most characteristic and recent 
facts of the political and speculative imbroglio of 
the time, it is enough to recollect again the later 
novels of Thackeray and Sir Bulwer Lytton, or 
any of Kingsley's, Mrs. Gaskell's, or Miss Bronte's. 
If the Real is to be represented in Novels, are not 
Puseyism, Socialism, Positivism, etc., among the 
last buddings of the Real ? Deep, indeed, in the 
l^resent time, might the art of the Realist go, 
if the Realist had courage to be what he pre- 
tends. With all our professions of rej^resenting 
what is exactly as it is, do we not as yet. Novel- 
ists and all of us, keep cunningly near the surface ? 



268 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

(2) It is impossible, however, for the Novelist, 
or any other artist, to limit himself to the mere 
function of representing what he sees. However 
dispassionate his mind, however determined he 
may be to regard the facts around him as so many 
objects to be observed, studied, represented, and 
nothing more, there will always be more or less of 
purpose blended with the r^resentation. All cre- 
ations of poetic art, nay, even all transcripts from 
nature by the historian, inasmuch as they are actu- 
ated by some mood or state of mind, have doc- 
trine or jDurpose worked into them, and may, on 
due analysis, be made to yield it. The very choice 
of such and such facts to be represented, to the 
exclusion of others, is a manifestation of purpose, 
of preference, of moral intention. " When we 
would philosophize, we philosophize; when we 
refuse to philosophize, then also in that very 
thing we philosophize ; always and necessarily we 
do philosophize." There is evidently room, how- 
ever, for large gradation in this resj^ect, in the in- 
terval between those novels and poems which, 
being constructed as far as may be on the princi- 
ple of pure representation, have their purpose 
involved and buried in the fact that they are neces- 
sarily allegories of the mind, or of some portion 
or phase of the mind that produced them ; and 
those other novels and poems, frequent in every 



NOVELS OF PURPOSE. 2G9 

time, which avow a didactic aim. To these last, 
in a more special sense, may be given the name 
Novels, or Poems of Purpose. Now, it is in ac- 
cordance with what has been said concerning the 
state of Britain and of Europe during the last ten 
years, that the proportion of Novels of such a 
kind — Novels made in the service not of " con- 
temporary fun," merely, but also of contemporary 
earnest — should have been on the increase. Such, 
at all events, has been the fact ; and so, in addition 
to the increase and extension of a persevering 
spirit of realism, we have to report, as character- 
istic of British novel-writing recently and at pres- 
ent, a great development of the Novel of Purpose. 
Not only, for example, have we had-Jiovels rep- 
resenting duly, as interesting i)henomena of the 
time. Chartism, Socialism, etc., in the sphere of 
secular politics, and Anglo-Catholicism, Evangeli- 
cism. Broad Church, etc., in the sphere of ecclesi- 
astical opinion ; we have also had novels in which 
the doctrines distinguished by these, or by otlier 
names, have been either inculcated, or satirized 
and reprobated, separately or jointly — Roman 
Catholic novels, Anglo-Catholic novels. Evangeli- 
cal novels, Broad-Church novels. Christian Social- 
ist novels. Temperance novels. Woman's Rights 
novels, etc. Hardly a question or doctrine of the 
last ten years can be pointed out that has not had 
23* 



270 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

a novel framed in its interest, positively or nega- 
tively. To a great extent, tales and novels now 
serve the purpose of j^amphlets. There are, of 
course, all varieties of merit in such novels, ac- 
cording to the nature of the doctrine propounded, 
and the depth of humanity and power of imagina- 
tion allied with the special belief. In some cases, 
the story is made so mechanically to the order of 
the dogma, and by a person of such shallow and 
narrow sympathies, and so destitute both of knowl- 
edge and of poetic genius, that the result is but a 
lifeless sequence of silly incidents, or a fierce 
polemical tirade. Illustrations of an oi3i30site 
kind, exhibiting liberality of sentiment and genius 
naturally poetical, powerfully at work under the 
inspiration of strong sj^eculative convictions of a 
general order, and even of precise conclusions on 
current social questions, are to be found, I believe, 
in novels ]3ut forth from very different quarters of 
the theological and political world, but nowhere 
so conspicuously as in those of Mr. Kingsley. 

By far the highest class of recent novels of pur- 
pose have been some which might be recognized 
by themselves, as constituting a peculiar group in 
the variety mentioned, under the name of the Art 
and Culture Novel, in our classification of British 
Novelists since Scott, and then spoken of as com- 
paratively rare among us. The novels I mean are 



NOVELS OF PURPOSE. 271 

those which, concerning themselves or not, in a 
dogmatic manner, with the specialities of jDresent 
political or ecclesiastical controversy, and being 
usually indeed the productions of minds not dis- 
posed to over-estimate such specialities, even when 
they artistically deal with them, address them- 
selves rather to that deeper question of fundamen- 
tal faith as against fundamental skepticism, which 
is proclaimed everywhere as the one paramount 
fact of the age — embodying certain views on this 
question in the sup^DOsed education of an imagin- 
ary hero, or of several imaginary personages 
together, who pass through various intellectual 
stages to attain one that is final. In all novels 
whatsoever, of course, the hero passes_through a 
series of mental stages, the usual goal or consum- 
mation being an all-consoling, all-illuminating 
marriage. But in the Art and Culture Novel, as 
I consider it, the design is to represent a mind of 
the thouo-htful order, strusforlino- throusfh doubt 
and error towards certainty and truth ; and the 
interest arises from the variation given to that one 
text which the poet has thus typically expressed : 

"Though now he serves me but pei-plexecUj^, 

Yet will I soon to clearness bring him thorough : 
Knows well the gardener from the greening tree 
That flower and fruit will deck the coming moiTOW." 



272 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

But though this text might be prefixed to all 
the novels of the class now under consideration, 
the interpretations actually given to it in different 
novels of the class are as various as the notions 
entertained by the different writers of novels, as 
to what constitutes remediable "perplexity," and 
as to what may be the maximum of attainable 
" clearness." Let me glance at some of the more 
clearly marked varieties in this respect. 

There are, first, those whose notions of the mor- 
ality to be inculcated, of the " clearness " to be 
attained, are moderate. Their reasoning, if it 
were to be articularly expressed, might take some 
such form as this: "Men complain of the doubt 
and uncertainty by which their thoughts and 
actions are perplexed ; but, after all, are there not 
many things sufficiently certain, if people would 
take the trouble to find them out, and enter them 
in their inventory of ascertained truths ? A man's 
creed consists, and must consist, in those things, 
whatever they are, which he has no doubt about ; 
all else is not his creed, but only his wish, his 
fancy, or an element of alien belief tlirough which 
he navigates, more or less honestly, and more or 
less conformably, by the rudder of his own. Ac- 
cepting this definition, and giving no place in one's 
creed, properly so called, to any proposition that 
could be ranked as diibitable, might not one still 



NOVELS OF PURPOSE. 273 

compose for one's self a very respectable creed by 
simply collecting all the known truths, all the 
clear indubitabilities, within one's reach? One 
might commence, if need were, with the law of 
gravitation ; about which, surely, there exists, out 
of Ireland, no doubt to speak of On this, as a 
basis, one might pile, without much eifort, a con- 
siderable body of other equally certain truths — 
truths mechanical, truths chemical, truths physio- 
logical; nay, it would surely be hard if one could 
not top the pyramid with a number of very impor- 
tant truths, rationally or historically ascertained, 
relating to man's social connections, and his con- 
duct in life — truths economical and prudential, 
furnished out of individual experience^ or out of 
the repertory of the sciences which refer to indus- 
try and its fruits; truths political of kindred ori- 
gin; and such truths ethical as are embodied in 
the time-honored maxims, 'Honesty is the best 
policy,' 'Be just and fear not;' together with 
whatever of more delicate and nicely evolved con- 
viction might form an appropriate apex. This, 
they say, is an age of intellectual anarchy ; but 
such a complement of ascertained truths is even 
now possible to any man ; and, unless one be all 
the more exacting in one's demands, and all the 
more difficult to rule, it is possible that, with such 
a complement of truths firmly in his possession, he 



274 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

might go throagh the world steadily, honorably, 
and usefully. But this possession is not born with 
a man; it has to be acquired. Man comes into 
the world regardless and unformed ; he has to lay 
down in his mind gradually, and one by one, even 
the fundamental blocks of his belief, and thereon 
to build whatever may come as superstructure. 
Even the knowledge of th^law of gravitation is 
not innate in the child, but has to be acquired by 
painful efforts, and a succession of tumbles. And 
so with truths of the more complex sciences, and 
with truths of the moral and social order, the 
acquisition of which last, and still more their effec- 
tive incorporation in the consciousness, so as to 
become a living and active faith, are processes 
extending, in almost every instance, far beyond 
the early period of life. Now, in so far as the 
novelist makes it his aim to exhibit, by fictitious 
examples, this process of the formation of charac- 
ter, or of the culture of the individual by circum- 
stance and by reflection, his task will consist in 
nothing less than this — the conduct of his imag- 
inary hero through his period of ignorance, empty- 
mindedness, aimless and unregulated impulse, and 
consequent error, on to that point, where, by the 
successive strokes upon him of the offended nat- 
ural laws, the fatigue of his successive buffetings 
with an element which always throws him back, 



NOVELS OF PURPOSE. 275 

and perhaps also the fortuitous occurrence of some 
happy juncture which lets in the light upon him 
in a sudden gush, and renders his obedience to 
law thenceforth easier, he comes into effective 
possession of such a complement of doctrine as, 
though it may not finish or satisfy him outright, 
may fit him for good citizenship, and serve him 
passably through the rest of life. Why this pro- 
cess of imaginary education should so frequently 
take the form of a love-story, protracted and com- 
plicated by oppositions of fate, separations, misun- 
derstandings, and even infidelities, but ending in a 
suitable marriage, is obvious enough. Not to 
mention other reasons, a very large proportion of 
those peculiar ethical problems the solution of 
which is necessary to impart something like final- 
ity to a man's creed and character, and so to frank 
him as a full citizen of the body politic, are prob- 
lems which are sup23osed to be best stated in the 
history of a passionate and thwarted love, and to 
receive their solution most naturally at the moment 
and through the agency of marriage. The most 
common forms of ' perplexity ' are such that the 
Novelist is only true to nature when he represents 
the ' perplexity ' as vanishing and the ' clearness ' 
as coming in the arms of Rosa or Emily. There 
the long-perturbed youth attains to light and 
calmness ; there he repudiates the doubts and the 



276 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

moral heresies of his bachelorhood, and wonders 
how he could ever have entertained them ; there 
he crowns his faith with the articles yet wanting 
to it, or conforms to the faith which he finds estab- 
lished. As the ancients said of men when they 
died, so it may be said of men when they marry, 
Aheimt ad plures : *they go over to the majority.' 
At this point, therefore, thelsTovelist in ordinary 
does well to take leave of them — not only because 
the interest in them is gone for one half of his 
readers, but also because he has led them on to 
a natural epoch in their existence. If he chooses, 
however, he may follow them still farther, and 
exhibit the process of their education as continued 
in their new circumstances, on to a second mar- 
riage or to any other conclusion that he may fix, 
including death itself." 

It is on the j)rinciples so explained, that most 
specimens we have of the peculiar kind of the 
Art and Culture Novel now under consideration 
are consciously or unconsciously constructed. Mr. 
Thackeray, for example, pilots young Pendennis 
past the siren Blanche Amory, and leaves him, 
wiser for his wanderings, in the haven of Laura's 
love. And so, in others of his novels, in so far as 
he intends them to be of the class under notice, 
the skepticism, or ignorance, or mental perplexity, 
of his hero, is represented as terminating, and the 



REPRESENTATIONS OF SKEPTICISM. 277 

better frame of mind is represented as arriving, 
in the event of marriage — save that (herein re- 
deeming his philosophy of character from the 
charge of facility that might otherwise attach to 
it) he is in the habit of making the heroes of 
his former novels reappear in their new capacity, 
as married men, in his subsequent ones, and reaj)- 
pear still fallible, and with something farther to 
seek. The skepticism represented as character- 
izing young Pendennis during his period of edu- 
cation, and until Warrington and Laura have 
cured him, is, I think, about the extreme, whether 
as regards kind or as regards extent, that is ever 
represented in our recent Art and Culture Novels 
of the more temperate order : . 

"The truth, friend!" Arthur said, impatiently; "where is 
the truth? Show it me. That is the question between us. I 
see it on both sides. I see it on the Conservative side of the 
house, and amongst the Radicals, and even on the Ministerial 
benches. I see it in this man, who worships by Act of Parlia- 
ment, and is rewarded with a silk apron and five thousand a 
year; in that man, who, driven fatally by the remorseless logic 
of his creed, gives up everything, friends, fame, dearest ties, 
closest intimacies, the respect of an army of churchmen, the 
recognized position of a leader, and passes over, truth-impelled, 
to the enemy, in whose ranks he is ready to serve henceforth 
as a nameless private soldier. I see the truth in that man, his 
brother, whose logic drives him to quite a different conclusion, 
24 



278 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

and who, after having passed a life in vain endeavors to recon* 
cile an irreconcilable book, flings it at last down in despair, and 
declares, with tearful eyes and hands up to heaven, his revolt 
and recantation. If the truth is with all these, why should I 
take sides with any one of them? . . . Yes; I am a Sad- 
ducee; I take things as I find them, and the world, and the 
acts of parliament of the world, as they are, and as I intend 
to take a wife, if I find one — not to be madly in love and pros- 
trate at her feet, like a fool — but to be good-natured to her, 
and courteous, expecting good-nature and pleasant society from 
her in turn. And so, George, if ever you hear of my marry- 
ing, depend on it, it won't be a romantic attachment on my 
side; and if you hear of any good place under government, I 
have no particular scruples, that I know of, which Avould pre- 
vent me from accepting your off'er." — " O Pen, you scoundrel, 
I know what you mean," here "Warrington broke out. 

This, I say, is about the extreme measure and 
nature of the skepticism that is treated in any of 
the novels now under consideration ; and Mr. 
Thackeray deserves credit for having so boldly, 
in a work of fiction, grasped so serious a phe- 
nomenon. Few of our recent novelists, perhaps, 
have been so explicit. Yet the novel from which 
the above quotation is made may stand as the 
type of a class becoming more common. As Mr. 
Thackeray leads Pendennis out of the condition 
of mind so represented, on to a final condition, 
in which, though there is no express repudiation 



REPRESENTATIONS OF SKEPTICISM. 279 

of some parts of the foregoing declaration, yet 
there is an infusion of more positive tenets, and 
the total spirit is braver and more manly, so, by 
an analogous process, do other novelists conduct 
their heroes on through a spirit of listlessness 
and moral aberration to a resting-ground of faith. 
There are, however, sub-varieties of method, and 
of general aim. I do not know that we have had 
any novels of this kind written distinctly in the 
interest of that philosophy which abjures all the- 
ology whatever, regards the theological habit in 
any form as a vice or a weakness, and proclaims 
it as the highest wisdom 

" To apprehend no farther than this world, 
And square one's life according." 

In actual novels, however, confining themselves 
as they usually do to the incidents of a secular 
life, we have, not unfrequently, something tanta- 
mount. The "perplexity" they represent is the 
perplexity of the ordinary struggle with fortune, 
and the ordinary weakness and impulsiveness of 
youth ; and the corresponding " clearness " at the 
end is the clearness of a settled worldly position, 
and a morality sufficiently disciplined to hold and 
enjoy it. Most fi-equently, however, there is a 
certain conventional recognition of the theologi- 



280 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

cal element; and, as a portion of the youth's 
"perplexity" is represented as consisting in his 
relaxed hold of religious doctrines, and his re- 
laxed attention to religious observances, so in the 
ultimate "clearness" there is usually involved a 
coming round again at marriage to the forsaken 
creed and the neglected worship. A pew is taken 
in the ivy-clad parish church; and, while the 
heroine, now the wife, willSrttend service twice 
on Sundays, the hero, now the husband, will make 
it his regular practice to go at least once. 

Mr. Kingsley, and others who might be asso- 
ciated with lum, have taught this peculiar novel 
of purpose a bolder flight. Admitting that there 
is a definite complement of truths relating to hu- 
man procedure which may be ascertained by rea- 
son, experience, and a scientific study of the nat- 
ural laws, and admitting, moreover, that a man 
will behave better or worse in this world, accord- 
ing as he has made up this secular kind of creed 
well or ill for himself, or has inherited it in perfect 
or imperfect condition from those who have edu- 
cated him, they yet maintain the inadequacy of 
any such conceivable complement of prudential 
or ethical truths self-evolved for the full satis- 
faction and regulation of the human being, and 
the necessity of a deeper faith — a faith metaphys- 
ical, in which these very truths must be rooted 



RELIGION IN NOVELS. 281 

ere they can function so powerfully as they might, 
or even retain, strictly speaking, any right to this 
name of "truths" under which they announce 
themselves. To undertake the voyage of life with 
no other outfit than this body of so-called secular 
doctrine, would be at best, they hold, to sail in 
a ship, well trimmed in itself, and under good 
sanitary regulation, but with no port in view, no 
compass, no reference to anything without the 
ship, not even to the sea in which it floats. Such 
seamanship as that would be which professed 
only an attention to the internal economy of the 
shi]) itself, and a neglect of its relations to the 
very element in which it moved, such, they think, 
would that doctrine of human life be which pro- 
fessed to ajDprehend only within the visible bounds 
of life, and to fabricate the final rule out of what 
might be perceptible there. Life is a voyage ; 
the element is time ; there is a port in the com- 
ing eternity. Nor is man left without the neces- 
sary knowledge whereby this voyage is to be gov- 
erned. Deep in the structure of the human mind 
itself, wdien it is duly investigated, there are found 
certain bonds of evident connection between it 
and the world of the metaphysical ; certain truths 
which the mind cannot but think, without ceas- 
ing to be, and abnegating the possibility of any 
stroke of truth thereafter ; certain principles, the 
24* 



282 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

conjunction of which makes it mind, and deter- 
mines the extent and mode of its grasp ; certain 
marks, so to speak, of its fractm-e from the body 
of the unseen universal. Out of the study of 
these, they say, arises Natural Religion — that 
kind of Religion which has always been in the 
world, and always will be in the world, all con- 
trary philosophy notwithstanding, so long as the 
world wheels on its axle, b^'s suffering and sor- 
row on its bulk, and turns its hemispheres alter- 
nately to the vaults of the stars. But this, they 
say, is not all. It has not been permitted to this 
world to wheel on in that faint kind of a light, 
scarce better than darkness, which wells forth 
from the human mind itself, preying eagerly on 
its own metaphysical roots, and carrying in it 
some few obscure ideas, some confused Platonic 
recollections, of the infinity whence it feels itself 
distorn. A Revelation has been given. Once 
and again, from the outer realms of mystery, a 
great light has struck our wheeling earth — struck 
it till its bosses beamed and glittered. Of old it 
came flutteringly through i^rophets and scattered 
men of God ; last of all and conclusively it came, 
it came at ISTazareth. " God, who at sundry times, 
and in divers manners, spake in times past unto 
the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last 
days spoken unto us by His Son, whom He hath 



RELIGION IN NOVELS. 283 

appointed heir of all things, by Avhom also He 
made the worlds." Yes, "heir of all things, by 
whom also He made the worlds ! " Backward 
from that point in the earth's history the light 
extends, involving the very beginnings and the 
offsets ; and forward from that point it also ex- 
tends, suffusing itself through all things, and 
involving the ends and the upshots. Let philos- 
ophies form and accumulate themselves, all will 
end in Christianity; let there be wars and revo- 
lutions, and let states and commonwealths rise 
and succeed each other, all are but preparations 
towards that kingdom of Christ, Avherein all will 
be included, for all things are His inheritance. 
And so with individual men now; be they what 
they may, all is incomplete withinThem, they are 
not fully men, until Christianity has occupied their 
being. This faith may, indeed, exist where it is 
n<5t suspected to be, and it may not be, alas! 
w^here it is least supposed to be absent ; but be 
it must, wherever man is to be essentially man, 
and life is to be at its highest potency. And 
so, wherever in literature, whether in history, in 
poem, or in novel, life is to be represented, and, 
above all, wherever the scheme is to exhibit the 
formation of character, and the progress of an 
individual mind through doubt and error to final 
certainty and truth, this recognition of Christian- 



284 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

ity as the supreme principle ought to be, with 
those who adopt the argument, unremittingly 
and unmistakably present. 

A while ago, the introduction of such considera- 
tions in connection with such a form of literature 
as the Novel might have seemed absurdly irrele- 
vant. In connection with Metrical Poetry, they 
might have seemed, in virtue of many precedents, 
relevant enough ; but they would have seemed out 
of relation to all, or to almost all, known precedents 
in modern prose fiction. That this is no longer 
the case, is owing to no one more evidently than to 
Mr. Kingsley. Not in that sj^irit, common enough 
among previous novelists of purpose, which simply 
treated orthodoxy as a part of established social 
propriety, and therefore attributed it to the hero 
or brought the hero over to it, as a matter of 
course, but in a spirit far more resolute and thor- 
oughgoing, does he uphold in his novels the neces- 
sity of Christian purpose. Whatever objections 
may be taken to this method, and whatever may 
be thought of his success, there can be no mis- 
take as to his intention. His very rhetoric is sur- 
charged, to the extent of a vehement mannerism, 
with the phrases of his Theology ; and there is not 
one of his novels that has not the power of Chris- 
tianity for its theme. In his splendid historical 
novel of Hyj^atia we have a representation of a 



ME. KINGSLEY. 285 

mind exercised amid the conflicts of a world all 
in chaos, with the Goths breaking through its old 
Polytheistic fabric and a vague Platonism bidding 
here and there for the possession of its leading 
Pagan minds, till at length the sole refuge is found 
in the conquering faith of the Christians. In his 
Westioard Ho! the purpose similarly is to show 
how Christianity, in its form of free Elizabethan 
Protestantism, lived and worked in the manly 
minds of an ao^e about the manliest that Eng-land 
has seen, and inspired them to actions and enter- 
prises the noblest in English history. And so, in 
his tales of present life, he is always fully alive to 
the struggle between belief and unbelief and be- 
tween various forms both of the one and of the 
other, which makes existing society what it is; 
and he either asserts positively the sole and su- 
preme efficiency of Christianty for the adequate 
rule of life in these latter days as in those that 
have gone before, exhibiting its applications to 
what may seem the most peculiar contemporary 
problems, or he suggests the same conclusion by 
the fictitious shipwreck of all that cannot, by a 
due latitude of interpretation, be brought within 
the Christian definition. What Mr. Kingsley has 
done in this respect, has been done also in a sim- 
pler walk of fiction, and with reference to a more 
definite order of interests, by the author of Tom 



286 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

Uroion. Here, in the story of the education of an 
English schoolboy, there is the same argument as 
in Mr. Kingsley's works for the supreme compe- 
tency of Christian principle in the formation of 
character ; and, though the immediate scene is but 
a public school, and the incidents are those of 
schoolboy life, yet, by the ultimate reference of 
all that happens for good in tliis little world to 
the influence of Dr. Arnold, not only is the exten- 
sion of the argument to society at large irresistibly 
suggested, but the argument itself is all the more 
impressively enforced by being associated with the 
memory of the man w^ho was so emphatically its 
repr-esentative. Having a basis of historic truth 
in its relation to such a man, enforcing its lesson 
with such direct honesty, and charged in every 
sentence with the very spirit of English manli- 
ness, little wonder that the book went straight 
to the popular heart, that its effects on the minds 
both of boys and of parents were immediate, and 
that the author was instantly recognized as a man 
from whom readers, tired of namby-pamby, might 
expect more books of the right Saxon sort. 

Compared, however, with Christianity as usually 
understood among the existing sects, the Christi- 
anity whose competency to all modern intellectual 
wants, and to all modern social problems, is thus 
proclaimed by Mr. Kingsley, and by others, might 



''TOM BROWN." 287 

certainly appear to be Christianity with a differ- 
ence. The concomitants, it is satirically suggested, 
— beer, tobacco, the boxing-gloves, athletic exer- 
cises in general, and a general readiness at all 
times to resort to the knock-down method of 
action, and to fight like a genuine John Bull, — 
are not the concomitants recognized in the usual 
definitions of Christianity, whether in the Greek 
or in the Latin Fathers. "More is the pity," 
reply the teachers who are attacked; but, not 
shrinking even from the historical question so pro- 
posed, they cite their proofs that the effective 
Christianity of all times has been of the brave 
and manly and liberal kind, which they seek to 
inculcate; and they argue that the_Christianity 
which some of the sects would substitute for it, 
is but a weak dilution of the authentic creed. 
The Christianity which such men as Tertullian, 
St. Augustine, and Luther professed — the Chris- 
tianity of the days when England was England, 
and Elizabeth sent her Drakes and Kaleighs to 
do English work against the Devil and the Span- 
iard, or Cromwell led his Ironsides to battle for 
the right — this, they say, and not any attenuated 
Christianity, whether of dry modern dogmatists or 
of feeble modern pietists, is the Christianity that 
will still be found capable of all the work, all the 
difiiculties, of our own present world, from our 



288 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

busy England on through the rest of Europe, and 
so through Asia, Africa, and America, with Aus- 
tralia to boot. Taking them at their word, but 
still with an implied jest at the large proportion 
of the above-mentioned concomitants in their rep- 
resentations of English Christianity as it might be, 
the critics have good-humoredly closed the con- 
troversy by affixing to the ^pctrine of Mr. Kings- 
ley and his school a witty nickname. They have 
called it the doctrine of "a muscular Christian- 
ity," and the heroes in whom it is embodied in 
their novels " muscular Christians." There is only 
about as much justice in the nickname as there is 
in nicknames in general ; but it has become cur- 
rent, and the writers at whom it is aimed have too 
much relish for humor to be anxious to protest 
against it. Indeed, if they were in want of a rea- 
son for letting it circulate, they might find one in 
an advantage which it might give them by way of 
retort. In the present day, they might say with 
some truth, the alternative with not a small num- 
ber of minds seems to be between this school of 
theirs of " a muscular Christianity " and a contem- 
porary school of "nervous Paganism," For, side 
by side with Mr. Kingsley and his school, or rather 
beyond them, and occupying a bleaker and more 
extreme standing-ground on the plain of specula- 
tion, are a body of thinkers — not unrepresented 



POEMS ABOUT POETS. 289 

either in our literature of prose fiction — Avhose 
characteristic it is that they also are incessantly 
ruminating the same high problems of the meta- 
physical without having the privilege of rest in 
the same solution. 

It has long been a subject of remark, and gener- 
ally of complaint, that so much of our Poetry is 
of the " subjective " kind — i. e., representative of 
the passing feelings, frenzies, doubts, longings 
and aspirations of the minds who are able so to 
express themselves, rather than of the vast world 
of fact, lying fixed, whether in the past or in the 
23resent, beyond the troubled bounds of the poet's 
own consciousness. From the time of Byron and 
Shelley, we have had a succession of ^ems exhib- 
iting individual minds of the thoughtful order 
shattered to their very foundations by passion and 
skepticism, at war with all the institutions of 
society, and bellowing to earth and heaven their 
sense of Nature's cruelty, and their own utter 
wretchedness. Recently, there has been a farther 
peculiarity in this kind of poetry, which has at- 
tracted the notice of critics. Poets have begun, 
as if systematically, to make imaginary Poets their 
heroes. On opening a recent book of poetry, the 
chance is that it is a Poet that will be found solil- 
oquizing, conversing with his friend, watching the 
moonlight with his mistress, or blaspheming his 
25 



290 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

destiny on a bridge at midnight. The opportunity 
so given for ridicule is obvious. "Why this per- 
petual writing about poets? Is there not the 
great world of action, from Adam downwards, to 
supply themes ? What percentage of the human 
race would all the j^oets alive amount to, that the 
human race is thus called upon so 23eremptorily to 
contemj^late them and thei^whistlings ? Does a 
shoemaker make shoes for himself alone ; or does 
a painter ahvays j^aint himself at his easel ? What 
was poetry meant to be but holding the mirror up 
to nature ? Why this perpetual holding up of the 
miiTor to the poet's own insignificant j^hysiog- 
nomy, with nothing but its wooden, unreflecting 
back to all the leagues of contemporary landsca2:)e, 
and to all the tide of life through six thousand 
years?" Now, though there is much natural 
temptation to such comments, they are essentially 
unfair. That phenomenon of intellectual restless- 
ness, which is exhibited over and over again in 
the poems in question, is a phenomenon of univer- 
sal time, intermingled with all that is, and with 
all that has been; and, in exhibiting it, the poet is 
not neglecting the world of past and present fact, 
but is only educing from its multifarious circum- 
stance that which is recurring and fundamental.. 
Moreover, though the phenomenon appertains to 
all time, it has so gained in visibility in the present 



NERVOUS PAGANISM. 291 

age of tlie world, that it presses more palpably for 
representation. Is not speculative anarchy pro- 
claimed everywhere as the fact of all others most 
characteristic of our time ; and is there not a 
larger number of minds than ever there was be- 
fore, revolving over and over again the same 
abstract problems, and, indeed, debarred by the 
arrangements of the time from any other habitual 
occupation ? If poets, in the actual sense, are still 
but a small minority of the body j)olitic, they are 
at least on the increase ; and the class of persons, 
for whom imaginary poets may stand as rej^resent- 
atives, and who will read the imaginary liistories 
of such i^oets with interest, is a class not only 
widely diffused, but also socially authoritative. 
In short, if a poet is thrown on a " weak piping 
time of peace," what is there for him to repre- 
sent as contemporary save the weakness and the 
pilling? 

The same reasoning would apply to the very 
special class of novels which corresponds with tlie 
poems in view. Such novels are, indeed, as yet 
rare — Verse having hitherto reserved mainly for 
itself themes so high and dangerous. But speci- 
mens are not wanting of fictitious representations 
in j^rose of mental perplexity at its uttermost, not 
ending in Mr. Kingsley's happy solution. Recent 
works of prose fiction might be named, in which. 



292 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

as in recent i^oems, a poet or some personage of 
the purely intellectual class is the hero, and the 
story is that of his progress through the very 
blackness of darkness, with only natural reason, 
or the revelation that can come through reason, as 
his guide. There is the mind preying on its own 
jnetaphysical roots ; there is the parting, piece by 
piece, with the old hereditarySfeith, and yet all the 
remaining torture of the ceaseless interrogation 
which that faith satisfied; there are the pangs of 
love despised or disprized ; there is the burden of 
sin, and the alternate sullenness and madness of 
despair. Sometimes the "clearness" is rej^re- 
sented as coming, and then in one or other of a 
few well-known forms. The happy marriage may 
be an occasional agency; but, even where it is 
admitted, its effect is but auxiliary. Sometimes 
the mind under j^i'obation is made to ascertain 
for itself that its perpetual metaphysical self-tor- 
ture, its j)erpetual labor on questions which cannot 
be answered, is a misuse of its faculties, and so to 
take rest in the philosophic conclusion that " man 
was not born to solve the problem of the universe, 
but to find out where the problem begins, and then 
to restrain himself within the limits of the com- 
prehensible." When this is the solution adopted, 
however, the result is represented as by no means 
the same as in the case previously imagined 



NERVOUS PAGANISM. 293 

of a mind that has ever exercised itself on the 
problems of the supernatural at all, but has se- 
cured its comfort from the outset by voting the 
supernatural to be non-extant, and proceeding to 
pile up, as one's sufficient creed, a few average 
certainties of the secular. No ; these average cer- 
tainties are, indeed, more eagerly adopted now 
because they may have been neglected heretofore, 
and a satisfaction is found that was not antici- 
pated in science and art and all the multiform use 
and investigation of the world as it is ; but the 
mind retains in it a touch of "the demonic" to 
witness to its old wanderings ; it works now with 
a higher and less calculable potency ; through the 
shell of darkness that enspheres thejvisible world, 
there glimmers the gauzy light of a world believed 
in, though pronounced impenetrable ; as the little 
island of life is tilled and cultivated, it is at least 
still known to be an island, and there is still heard 
in its midmost fields the roar of the surrounding 
sea. Or, again, sometimes there is more than this 
merely negative conclusion. The mind in its 
gropings has seized some actual belief, supernatu- 
ral in its reference, which it will not afterwards 
let go, and which anchors it howsoever it ranges; 
or a dead hand, it may be, seems stretched in 
one's behalf from the world of spirits ; or it is as 
when Dante walked on earth, and there hovered 
25* 



294 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

ever before him, interpretative of all around and 
apocalyptic of all beyond, the vision of his beati- 
fied Beatrice. Generally, too, as a part of one or 
other of these solutions, there is an assertion of 
the sanative virtue of action, of the power of 
work to dispel doubt and despair, and to heal a 
mind fevered by an excess of speculation. And 
so at the close, as in Maud^ there is the glimpse 
of some enterprise into which the mind, recover- 
ing its reason, may plunge, and in which, though 
it is lost to view, the fancy may follow its benefi- 
cent activity. 

" And as months ran on, and rumor of battle grew, 
' It is time, it is time, passionate heart,' said I — 
(For I cleaved to a cause that I felt to he pure and true) — 
' It is time, passionate heart and morbid eye, 
That old hysterical mock-disease should die.' 
And I stood on a giant deck, and mix'd my breath 
With a loyal people shouting a battle-cry, 
Till I saw the dreary phantom arise and fly 
Far into the North, and battle, and seas of death." 

Perhaps, however, the most characteristic of the 
special class of fictions which we have been describ- 
ing are those in which "clearness" is not repre- 
sented as coming at all, but which confine them- 
selves merely to a statement of the question. The 
perpetual knocking at the unopened door — such 



HIGHER POETIC POWER. 295 

is their image of human life. This is Nervous 
Paganism at its uttermost ; and one or two speci- 
mens of it in our prose literature, not actually call- 
ing themselves novels, but really such, might be 
specified, were it not that their authors would feel 
a reluctance to being named. Muscular Pagans 
would not mind it. 

(3) In addition to the tendency to a wider and 
more persevering Realism, and also to the marked 
tendency to more of doctrinal and didactic earnest- 
ness in all directions, there may be reported, 
respecting our recent and contemporary novel- 
writing, the appearance here and there of more of 
purely poetic aim, and of a larger power and lib- 
erty in the ideal. While, on the one hand, our 
novelists are striving after a closer rendering of 
life as it is throughout all, ranks of society and all 
professions, on the other hand, we find in some 
novelists, and sometimes where this virtue of Peal- 
ism exists in high degree, a disposition to vindi- 
cate for the novel also that right of ideality which 
is allowed to metrical Poetry, and so to introduce 
in their novels incidents, scenes, and characters not 
belonging to the ordinary world, but holding their 
tenure from the sway of phantasy. I have already 
named Mr. Dickens as a novelist in w^hom the poetic 
capability is strongly developed. There are por- 
tions also of Miss Bronte's novels where the imagi- 



296 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

nation breaks away from social fact, and exercises 
itself in visual and other allegories; and in Mr. 
Kingsley's bold descriptions of scenery, his heroic 
and impassioned conceptions of character, and the 
romantic sequence of his incidents and situations, 
there is as marked an inroad as has been made in 
recent prose fiction into the peculiar domain of the 
Poet. The mere citation o|^such instances will 
suffice to explain what is meant; and I would 
only observe ikrther, that, as in such novelists 
there is more and more of the higher matter of 
poetr}^, so, wherever this is the case, their language 
too assumes more and more of the poetical and 
even of the metrical form. As Mr. Dickens and 
Mr. Kingsley, for example, may be associated, in 
^-irtue of much of the matter of their writings, 
with such elder prose-poets as Wilson and De 
Quincey (and these two, it is to be remembered, 
take rank also among our novelists), so from their 
writings, too, passages might be extracted which 
might be read, with scarce an alteration, as good 
unconscious verse. 

There are no symptoms yet that the Novel is 
about to lose its popularity as a form of literature. 
On the contrary, there is every symptom, that in 
one shape or another it vrill continue to be popu- 
hir for a long time, and that more and more of tal- 



DESIDERATA. 2i)7 

ent will flow into it. The very remarks which 
we have been making as to the recent tendencies 
and characteristics of our British novel-writing 
are proofs to this effect. The Novel, we have 
found, has been becoming more real and determi- 
nate, in so far as it can convey matter of fact, 
more earnest, in so far as it can be made a vehicle 
for matter of si^eculation, and more conscious, at 
the same time, of its ability in all matter of phan- 
tasy. What is this but saying that its capabilities 
have been increasing simultaneously as regards 
each of the three kinds of intellectual exercise 
which make ujD total literature — History, Philos- 
ophy, and Poetry ; and what is this again but say- 
ing, that in future there may be eitjier a greater 
disposition among those who naturally distribute 
themselves according to this threefold classifica- 
tion to employ it for their several purposes, or a 
greater desire among those Avho are peculiarly 
novelists to push its powers in the threefold ser- 
vice ? On such a supposition, we may venture, in 
conclusion, on three hopes as to the Novel of the 
future, corresponding severally to the three ten- 
dencies which have been indicated as most con- 
spicuous in the Novel of the present : 

I. In the interest of the Novel considered in its 
relations to History, or as a form of literature 
representing the facts of human life, there might 



298 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

be a more general recognition than heretofore, 
both among Novelists and their readers, of the full 
theoretical capabilities of the Novel, as being the 
prose counterpart of the Epic. In other words, 
there might be more attention among our novel- 
ists of real life to epic breadth of interest. 

I may illustrate my meaning by a particular 
instance of the defect I have in view. It will not 
be denied, I think, that, by the conversion of the 
Novel, in the hands of the mnjority of modern 
novelists, and especially of lady-novelists, into a 
mere love and marriage story, there has been a 
serious contraction of its capabilities. Of Love, as 
an influence in human affairs, it is impossible 
either for History or for Romance to exaggerate 
the importance. Over every portion of human 
society, from the beginning of the world till how, 
over every little hand's-breadth of British or of 
any other society at this moment, there has waved, 
there is waving, the white hand of Aphrodite. 
And what effects of the white hand wherever it 
waves — what sweet pain, what freaks and mis- 
chiefs, what trains of wild and unforeseen events, 
what derangements and convulsions, not confined 
to the spots where they begin, but sending forth 
circles of tremor, which • agitate all interests, and 
ripple sometimes to the thrones of kings ! Through 
love, as a portal, man and woman both pass, at 



LOVE AND MARRIAGE NOVELS. 299 

one point or another, ere they are free of the cor- 
poration of the human race, acquainted with its 
laws and constitution, and partakers of its privi- 
leges. That this feeling, then, and all that apper- 
tains to it, should receive large recognition in lit- 
erature, that representations of it should be multi- 
plied, and that histories should be constructed to 
exhibit it, is right and necessary ; nor can any his- 
tory or fiction be accounted a complete rendering 
of all life in which this particular interest is omit- 
ted or made insignificant. But there are other 
human " interests " — if we may use that hacknied 
word — besides Love and Marriage. There are 
other deities in the Polytheistic Pantheon besides 
Aphrodite. There is Apollo, the physician and 
artist; there is Minerva, the wise and serene; 
there is Juno, the sumptuous and queenly ; there 
is the red god. Mars ; not fiir ofi" sits green-haired 
Neptune ; all around is Pan, the wood-rover ; and 
down upon all, the resting bolt in his hand, looks 
the calm and great-browed Jove. It was the ac- 
tion and inter-action of these deities that, in the 
Pagan philosophy, produced life — Venus having 
only her characteristic part ; and, if for deities we 
substitute principles, the same is true, yet. Ex- 
actly, therefore, as, in the Homeric Epic, the whole 
Pantheon was engaged, and Yenus ap23ears but now 
and then to wave her hand and have it wounded, 



300 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

SO, to constitute a true modern epic, there must be 
the like subordination, the like A^ariety. And, in- 
deed, in almost all the greater novelists, whether 
of our own or of other countries, — Richardson 
being one of the exceptions, — and certainly in all 
the greatest narrative and dramatic poets, this 
breadth of interest, this ranging of the mind 
over a wide surface of the phenomena of human 
life, has been conspicuously characteristic. In 
Cervantes, we have all Spain to range over. In 
Shakspeare's dramas we have love in abundance, 
and, at least, some thread or hint of love in each ; 
but what a play throughout of other interests, and 
in some how rare the gleam of the white hand 
amid the spears of warriors and the deliberations 
of senates ! So in Scott ; and so in almost every 
other very eminent novelist. That so many of 
our inferior novels now should be love and mar- 
riage novels, and nothing more, arises jDcrhajiS 
from the fact, that the novel-reading age in the 
one sex falls generally between the eighteenth 
and the twenty-fifth year, and that, with the other 
sex, in the present state of our social arrange- 
ments, the " white hand " remains, directly or in- 
directly, the permanent human interest during the 
whole of life. 

II. In the interest of the Novel, considered as 
a vehicle for doctrine, a very considerable influx 



ART AND DOCTRINE. 301 

into it both of the speculative spirit and of the 
best results of speculation, is yet to be desired. 

The question of the proper limits within which 
a poet or other artist may seek to inculcate doc- 
trine through his works, is one on which some- 
thing has already been said in connection with 
those recent novels which we have named Novels 
of PurjDOse. It is, however, a question, the com- 
plete discussion of which would involve many far- 
ther considerations. 

On the one hand, the popular distaste for works 
of art evidently manufactured to the order of 
some moral or dogma, is founded on a right in- 
stinct. The art of Shakspeare in his dramas, as 
it is and always has been more popuhu' than the 
art of Ben Jonson in his, is also deeper and truer 
in principle. Moreover, it- may be said, there is a 
certain incompatibility between the spirit in which 
an artist proceeds, and the spirit in which a teacher 
or dogmatist ought to proceed, if he is true to his 
calling. It is the supposed essence of a work of 
art that it shall give pleasure; but perhaps it is 
the test of efficient doctrine that it shall give 
pain. The artist may lawfully aspire to be popu- 
lar ; the teacher who aspires to popularity does so 
at his peril. It might be a true testimony to the 
power of an artist that the crowd were crowning 
him with laurel in the market-place ; but respect- 
26 



302 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

ing a moralist, or spiritual reformer, a truer testi- 
mony might be that they were taking up stones to 
stone him. Works of art and imagination are 
such that those who produce them may live by 
their sale, and not necessarily be untrue to their 
function; the very worst feature in our modern 
organization of literature is that so many literary 
m'cn must live by the salig^of doctrine. When 
doctrine has to be sold to enable its producer to 
go on producing more, there is a grievous chance 
that the doctrine last sold, and the farther doctrine 
in preparation, will, more or less consciously, be of 
a kind to be salable. True, the laborer even in 
doctrine is worthy of his hire; but he will labor 
perhaps better if he is in circumstances not to 
require any. In the ancient Greek world it was 
the men who were called Sophists who took fees 
for their teaching ; the philosopher Socrates had his 
bread otherwise. He earned his bread by sculp- 
ture, of the quality of which we do not hear much ; 
by his philosophy, of the quality of which we can 
judge for ourselves, all that he got from the public 
in his life was a cup of hemlock. But, though we 
thus regard it as the distinction between the true 
Greek philosophers and the contemporary Sophists 
that the Sopliists taught for hire and the philoso- 
phers gratuitously, we do not extend the inference 
to the Greek dramatists. They probably expected 



AET AND DOCTRINE. 303 

to be paid handsomely, as well as to be applauded, 
for their dramas ; and yet their dramas were such 
as we see. And so, in the case of the modern 
novel, wliat chance is there for the novelist of at- 
taining his legitimate end as an artist, that of com- 
municating and diffusing pleasure, if he aims also 
at reforming society by a strenuous inculcation of 
doctrine, which, in so far as it is good and calcu- 
lated for the exigency, ought almost necessarily to 
irritate ? 

Now, without waiting to detect a certain amount 
of fallacy which mingles with the general truth of 
such an argument, it might be enough to fall back 
on the consideration already adduced — that every 
artist, poet, or novelist, is also a thfnker, whether 
he chooses or not. The imagination is not a fac- 
ulty working apart; it is the whole mind thrown 
into the act of imagining; and the value of any 
act of imagination, therefore, or of all the acts of 
imagination of any j^articular mind, will depend 
on the total strength and total furnishing of the 
mind, doctrinal contents and all, that is thrown in- 
to this form of exercise. Every artist is a thinker, 
whether he knows it or not; and ultim|itely no 
artist will be found greater as an artist than he was 
as a thinker. The novelist chooses a certain por- 
tion of life to be imaginatively represented ; well, 
there is latent doctrine in the very choice. He is 



304 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

the 231-0 viclence of the mimic world he has framed ; 
well, he must conduct it, consciously or uncon- 
sciously, according to some philosophy of life. He 
makes his characters reason and act in different 
situations and in modes calling for approbation or 
reprobation ; well, he is, in spite of himself, a good 
or a bad moral casuist. Now, to the extent to 
which these obvious facts caj^ry us, is it not to be 
wished that our novelists brought to their business 
a fair amount of scientific capital, a fair amount of 
acquaintance with the best thoughts that may be 
current on the subjects of greatest interest and 
importance? Is the wish unnecessary? It hardly 
appears to be so. If there is any kind of literary 
attempt to which a mind empty of all knowledge 
is apt, nevertheless, to think itself quite competent, 
is it not to writing a novel ? And what havoc, in 
our actual novels, of the most simple and certain 
principles ! The very element in which the novel- 
ist works is human nature; yet what sort of Psy- 
chology have we in the ordinary run of novels ? 
A Psychology, if the truth must be spoken, such 
as would not hold good in a world of imaginary 
cats, not to speak of men ; impossible conforma- 
tions of character; actions determined by motives 
that never could have determined the like; sud- 
den conversions brought about by logical means 
of such astounding simplicity that wonder itself 



ART AND DOCTRINE. 305 

is paralyzed in contemplating them; chains of 
events defying all laws of conceivable causation ! 
How shaky, also, the Political Economy and the 
Social Science of a good many of om* novelists — 
sciences in the matter of which they must work, 
if not also in that of some of the physical scien- 
ces, in framing their fictitious histories ! Before 
novels or poems can stand the inspection of that 
higher criticism which every literary work must 
be able to pass ere it can rank in the first class, 
their authors must be at least abreast of the best 
speculation of their time. Not that wiiat we want 
from novelists and poets is further matter of spec- 
ulation. What we want from them is matter of 
imagination ; but the imagination of_ji well-fur- 
nished mind is one thing, and that of a vacuum 
is another. Respecting some kinds of novels — 
those included, for example, in the more profound 
order of what we have called novels of purpose — 
our demands might be higher. That a waiter may 
be fitted to frame imaginary histories illustrating 
the deeper j)roblems of human education, and to 
be a sound casuist in the most difiicult questions 
of human experience, it is necessary that he, should 
bring to his task not only an average aquamtance 
with the body of good current doctrine, but also 
an original speculative faculty. In such cases, the 
desirable arrangement might be either that our 
26* 



306 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

novelists were philosophers, or that philosophers 
were our novelists. 

III. In the interest of the N^ovel, considered as 
a variety of general Poetry, there might be a more 
decided assertion of its competency for the higher 
as well as for the lower exercises of the poetic fac- 
ulty, of its fitness for representations of the grand, 
the elemental, the ideal, as^well as for representa- 
tions of the socially minute, varying, and real. In 
other words, there might, with advantage, be a 
protest, within certain limits, and especially at 
present, against the exclusive practice of what is 
called the novel of social reality. I have so often 
touched on this topic that it may be well here 
somewhat to vary my language in returning to it. 
Several times I have used the word " elemental " 
as synonymous, or nearly so, with the word " ideal," 
and as j^erhaps less objectionable, inasmuch as it 
avoids the notion of opposition to the " real," 
which this latter word is apt to suggest, and which 
is not intended. Let me now, therefore, confine 
myself to that word, and explain more distinctly 
what is meant by it. 

The old doctrine of the Four Elements is now 
naught in Science ; but there is a lingering validity 
in it, in respect that to the merely intuitive eye the 
four elements recognized in it still seem to com- 
pose the totality of nature, and yet to be distinct 



THE "ELEMENTAL." 307 

among themselves. There is the brown and stable 
Earth, mineral or organic ; round its massive bulk 
roars and surges the fluid element of Water, here 
collected in oceans, there distributed in streams ; 
over Earth and Water alike blows the fickle ele- 
ment of Air, deepening, as the eye ascends, from 
invisible transparency to the still bhie of the heav- 
enly dome ; and finally, scattered through all, is 
the fiercer element of Fire, here tonguing over the 
earth wherever it may be kindled, there flashing 
through the ether, and, high over all, as natural 
vision fancies, collected permanently into points 
and orbs. Moreover, this distribution of external 
nature by the eye sinks inward into the mind, be- 
comes a mode of universal thought, andT aflfects our 
language respecting mind itself Some souls, solid 
and strong, seem to have an affinity with the earth ; 
some, more fluid, with the water ; some, soft and 
supersubtle, with the air ; some, hot and terrible, 
with the fires and the lightnings ; while some there 
are — earthy-fiery, fiery-aerial, and the like — whose 
affinities must be represented as compound. Nay, 
more, it will be found that the element to which 
any mind is referred by those, observing its) opera- 
tions, is also generally that for the sensible circum- 
stance of which it shows, in its fancies, a marked af- 
fection. Shelley might be classed as an aerial spirit 
with a touch of fainter fire ; and the circumstance 



308 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

with which Shelley's poetry abounds is that of Me- 
teorology. 

So much for the word " elemental " as it might 
be afforded to us out of the obsolete, but still sig- 
nificant, doctrine of the Four Elements. But- Ave 
need not associate the word with any such doc- 
trine. The elemental in nature or in life, may be 
defined as consisting simpl^j^of those objects or 
phenomena in each, which are recognized as most 
large, comprehensive, primitive, impressive, and 
enduring. There is an elemental of the physical 
world, and there is an elemental of the moral 
world. The elemental in the physical world con- 
sists of the more massive and enduring phenomena 
of that Avorld, of those larger sights and sounds of 
nature that impressed men primevally, and that 
continue to impress powerfully now, — the wide ex- 
panse of earth, barren with moor or waving with 
corn and forest ; the sea, restless to the horizon, 
and rolling its waves to the beach ; the gusts of 
the raging tempest ; the sun, majestic in the heav- 
ens, and the nocturnal glory of the stars ; the 
clouds, the rains, the rocks, the vales, the moun- 
tains. To these more massive and permanent ob- 
jects, or phenomena of the physical world, there cor- 
respond objects or phenomena of the moral world, 
distinguished from the rest as also more massive 
and enduring. Birtli, Life, Death ; Labor, Sorrow, 



4 
THE ''ELEMENTAL." 309 



Love, Revenge ; the thought of the Whence, the 
thought of the Why, the thought of the Whither 
— these, in the moral world, are the considerations 
that are elemental. Men of old revolved them ; 
we .revolve them ; those who come after us will re- 
volve them. As in the physical world there are in- 
finite myriads of phenomena, complex and minute, 
aggregated on the basis of the elemental, and into 
which the elemental may be decomposed, so on 
these fundamental feelings, facts, and thoughts of 
the moral world, are all the minuter facts of social 
experience piled, and over these as their basis they 
roll in varying whirl. These are the generalities ; 
the rest are the minutiae. lN"ow, to the hundred 
definitions that have been given of genius, let this 
one more be added — that that soul is a soul of 
genius which is in afiinity with the elemental in 
nature and in life, and which, by the necessity of its 
constitution, tends always from the midst of the 
complex and minute to the simple and general. 

I know not where the difference betw^een the 
purest form of the passion for the elemental on 
the one hand, and the most prurient form- of affec- 
tion for mean social detail on the other, i^ better 
represented than in the contrast between the 
Archangels and Me^Dhistopheles in the Prologue 
to Goethe's " Faust." The Prologue opens with a 
hymn of the three Archangels, singing, first sev- 



310 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

erally, and then together, before the throne of 
Deity : 

" RAPHAEL. 

In chorus with each kindred star 

The Sun sends forth his ancient song, 
And on his path, prescribed from far. 

In thunder going, rolls along : 
The Angels gather strengtB7 beholding, 

Though none their substance fathom may; 
The mystic works of Thy upholding 

Are lordly as on Time's first day. 

GABRIEL. 

And swift and swift, all thought outstripping. 

Wheels round the pomp of Earth in sight. 
Its daily gleam of Eden dipping 

In deep and horror-teeming night: 
The sea, in mighty billows dashing, 

Up-foams against the rock's deep base; 
And rock and sea, together crashing, 

Whirl ceaseless in the starry race. 



And loud storms roar, their warfare waging 
From sea to land, from land to sea; 

And fashion round it, in their raging, 
A girdle, woven wondrously : 

There flames the flash of desolation, 
To clear the coming thunder's way: 



THE ''ELEMENTAL." 311 

Yet, Lord, we have in veneration 
The gentle going of thy day. 

THE THREE. 

The Angels gather strength, beholding, 
Though none Thy substance fathom may; 

And all the works of Thy upholding 
Are lordly as on Time's first day." 

As the song ends, Mephistopheles comes forward ; 
and mark, in contrast, the tenor of his speech : 

*'0f suns and worlds deuce one word can I gabble; 
I only know how men grow miserable. 
The little god of earth is still the same oldclay, 
And is as odd this hour as on Creation's day. 
Better somewhat his situation, 

Hadst Thou not given him that same light of inspiration: 
Reason he calls 't, and uses 't so that he 
Grows but more beastly than the very beasts to be. 
He seems to me, begging your Grace's pardon. 
Like one of those long-legg'd things in a garden. 
That fly about, and hop, and spring, 
And in the grass the same old chirrup sing. 
Would I could say that here the story closes! ( 
But in all sorts of dirt they thrust their noses." 

These are the two moods. They reproduce them- 
selves in literature. In all the greater literature 



312 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. 

of the world, from Homer and the Greek Drama 
downwards, there is heard the tone of the Ele- 
mental song. I^or need it be absent in our Prose 
Fiction. No more than our metrical Poetry must 
this form of literature be permitted to degenerate 
into a ceaseless variation of the speech of Mephis- 
topheles, that men are as miserable as ever, and 
that the world is all in a me^s. It may be that 
the representation of social reality is, on the 
whole, the proper business of the Novel; but 
even in the representation of social reality the 
spirit may be that of the far-surveying and the 
sublime. I believe, however, that there may be 
vindicated for the literature of prose phantasy the 
liberty of an order of fiction different from the 
usual Novel of Social Reality, and approaching 
more to what has always been allowed in metrical 
poesy, and that, accordingly, those occasional prose 
fictions are to be welcomed which deal with char- 
acters of heroic imaginary mould, and which re- 
move us from cities and the crowded haunts of 
men. 



THE END. 



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I am not acquainted with any similar collection in the English language that can 
compare with it for purposes of instruction or amusement. I should rejoice to see 
that set of books in every house in our country. — Re v. John O. Choules, D. D. 

The information contained in this work is surprisingly great ; and for the fireside, 
and the young, particularly, it cannot fail to prove a most valuable and entertaining 
companion. — N. Y. Ernngrhst. 

An admirable compilation. It unites the useful and entertaining. — N. Y. Com. 



CHAMBERS'S WORKS. 



CHAMBEKS'S HOME BOOK AND POCKET MISCEL. 

LANY. Containing a Choice Selection of Interesting and Instructiva 
Reading for the Old and the Young. Six vols. 16mo, cloth, 3,00. 

This work is considered fully equal, if not superior, to either of the Chambers's 
other works in interest, and, like them, contains a vast fund of valuable information. 
Following somewhat the plan of the "Miscellany," it is admirably adapted to the 
echool or the family library, furnishing ample variety for every class of readers, both 
Old and young. 

We do not know how it is possible to publish so much good reading matter at such 
alow price. We speak a good word for the Hterary excellence of the stories in this 
work ; we hope our people will introduce it into all their families, in order to drive 
away tlic miserable flashy-trashy stuff so often found in the hands of our young 
people of both sexes. — Scientific American. 

Both an entertaining and instructive work, as it is a very cheap one. — Puritan Rec. 

It cannot but have an extensive circulation. — Albany Express. 

Of all the series of cheap books, this promises to be the best. — Bangor Mercury. 

If any person wishes to read for amusement or profit, to kill time or improve it, get 
" Chambers's Home Book." — Chicago Times. 

Tlie Chambers are confessedly the best caterers for popular and useful reading in 
tlie world. — Willis's Home Journal. 

A very entertaining, instructive, and popular work. — JV. Y. Commercial. 

The articles are of that attractive sort which suits us in moods of indolence wheu 
vre would linger half way between wakefulness and sleep. TJiey require just thought 
and activity enough to keep our feet from the land of Nod, wtttrout forcing us to run, 
walk, or even stand. — Eclectic, Portland. 

It is j ust the thing to amuse a leisure hour, and at the same time combines instruc- 
tion witli amusement. — Dover Inquirer. ■ 

Messrs. Chambers, of Edinburgh, have become famous wherever the English lan- 
guage is spoken and read, for their interesting ^nd instructive publications. They 
combine instruction with amusement, and throughout they breathe a spirit of the 
purest morality. — Chicago Tribune, 

CHAMBERS'S REPOSITORY OF INSTRUCTIVE AND 

AMUSING PAPERS. With Illustrations. An entirely New Series, 
containing Original Articles, p. 260, 16mo, cloth, per vol. 50 cents. 

The Messrs. Chambers have recently commenced the publication of this work, un- 
der the title of "Ciiambeks's Repository of Instkuctive and Amusixo 
•Tracts," similar in style, etc., to the " Miscellany," which has maintailfied an enor- 
tnous circulation of more than eiglity thousand copies in England, aiid has already 
reached nearly the same in this country. Arrangements have beeft made by the 
American publishers, to issue the work simultaneoiisly with the English edition, a 
volume every two months, to continue until the whole series is completed. Each 
volume complete in itself and will be sold in sets or single volumes. 

feiT- Commendatory Letters, Reviews, Notices, &c., of each of Chambers's works, 
eufficient to make a good sized duodecimo volume, have been received by the pub- 
lishers, but room here will only allow giving a specimen of the vast multitude at 
hand. They <ire all popular, and contain valuable instructive and entertaining read* 
ing — Buch as should be found in every family, school, and college library. 

F 



VALUABLE WORKS. 

ANCIENT LITERATURE AND ART. Miscellaneous 
Essays on Subjects connected with Classical Literature, with the Biogra- 
phy and Correspondence of eminent Philologists. By Profs. Barnas 
Sears, Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, B. B. Ed- 
wards, of Andove: , and C. C. Felton, of Cambridge. Second thou- 
sand. 12mo, cloth, 1,25. 

CSr A work of great interest to the scholar and the general reader, and one of high 
literary merit, containing the contributions of three gentlemen who may be classed 
among the most distinguished scholars of our country. 

A noble monument to the taste, and judgment, and sound learning of the project- 
ors, and will yield, we doubt not, a rich harvest of fame to themselves, and of benefit 
to our literature. — Christian Review. 

It is refreshing, truly, to sit down with such a booK as this. When the press is 
teeming with the hasty works of authors and publishers, it is a treat to take up a book 
that is an honor, at once, to the arts and the literature of our country. — X. Y. Obs. 

This is truly an elegant volume, both in respect to its literary and its mechanical 
execution. Its tj'pographical appearance is an honor to the American press ; and the 
intrinsic character of the work is highly creditable to the age. It is a novel work, and 
may be called a plea for classical learning. — Puritan Recorder. 

MODERN ERENCH LITERATURE, (Chambers's People's 
Edition,) hy L. Raymond De Vericour ; Revised, with JVotes, alluding 
particularly to writers prominent in late political events at Paris. By 
William Staughton Chase, A. M. Second thousand. With a fine 
portrait of Lamartine. 12mo, cloth, 1,25. 

This is one of the most valuable works that has recently been given to the public. 
We have risen from its perusal, gratified with the large accessions of knowledge which 
we have gained of the literature of France. — Puritan Recorder. 

To every lover of the attractive literature of France, this work will be one of un- 
mixed interest. It is n publication of no ordinary merit. — Boston Atlas. 

The key to the French character is its Literature. This work is a clear, well-con- 
sidered exposition of modern literature by one himself a Frenchman. Theadditions 
by the American editor enhance materially the value of the work. — P/h7. Sat. Cour. 

This is an elegant, able, and highly interesting work. It will be found, we venture 
to predict, one of the best works of its character ever issued. — N. Y. Cour. and Enq. 

THE LIFE OF GODFREY WILLIAM VON LEIBNITZ. 

By John M. Mackie, Esq., on the basis of the German work of Dr. G. 

E. Guhratter. 12mo, cloth, 75 cts. 

We commend this book, not only to scholars and men of science, but to all our 
readers who love to contemplate the life and labors of a great and good man. It 
merits the special notice of all who are interested in the business of education, and 
deserves a place by the side of Brewster's Life of Newton, in all the libraries of our 
schools, academies, and literary institutions.— Watchman and Reflector. 

MEMOIR OF ROGER VYILLIAMS, ivomider of the State 
of Rhode Island. By Prof. William Gammell, 12mo, cloth, 75 cts. 



VALUABLE WORK. 



CYCLOPEDIA OF ANECDOTES OF LITERATURE 
AND THE FIXE ARTS. Containing a copious and choice selection of 
Anecdotes of the various forms of Literature, of the Arts, of Architecture, 
En'gravings, Music, Poetry, Painting, and Sculpture, and of tiie most cel- 
ebrated Literar}' Characters and Artists of different Countries and Ages, 
&c. By Kazlitt Arvixe, A. M., Author of " Cyclopaedia of Moral and 
Religious Anecdotes." With illustrations. 725 pages octavo, cloth, 3,00. 

This is unquestionably the choicest collection of anecdotes ever published. It con- 
tains three thousand and forty Anecdotes, ana such is the wonderfr.l varietj', that it 
will be found an almost inexhaustible fund of interest for every class of renders ; 
and to public speakers, to all classes of literary and scientific men, to artists, inechan- 
ics, and others, a perfQct DicTioyA.Rr, for reference. There are also more than one 
hundred and fifty fine Illustrations. 

We know of no work which comprises so much valuable information in a form so 
entertaining. — i\\ Y. Chronicle. 

Here is a perfect repository of the most choice and approved specimens of this spe- 
cies of information. The work is replete willi such entertainment as is adapted to all 
grades of readers, the most or least intellectual. — Methodist Quarterly Magazine. 

One of the most complete things of the kind ever given to the public. There is 
Bcarccly a paragraph in the whole book which will not interest some one deeply ; for, 
while men of letters, argument, and art cannot afford to do without its immense fund 
of sound maxims, pungent wit, apt illustrations, and brilliant examples, the mer- 
chant, mechanic and laborer will find it one of the choicest companions of the liours 
of relaxation. " Whatever be the mood of one's mind, andr-lKiwever limited the time 
for reading, in the almost endless varietj' and great brevity of the articles he can find 
something to suit his feelings, wliich he can begin and end at once. It may also ba 
made the very life of the social circle, containing pleasant reading for all ages, at all 
times and seasons. — Buffalo Com. Advertiser. 

A well spring of entertainment, to be drawn from at any moment. — Bangor Whig. 

A magnificent collection of anecdotes touching literature and the fine arts. — AU 
bany Spectator. 

The most comprehensive collection of anecdotes ever published. — Salem Gazette. 

A publication of which there is little danger of speaking in too flattering terms ; a 
perfect Thesaurus of rare and curious information, carefully selected and method- 
ically arranged. A jewel of a book to lie on one's table, to snatch up in those brief 
moments of leisure that could not be very profitably turned to account by recourse 
to any connected work in any department of literature. — Troy Budget. 

No family ought to be without it, for it is at once cheap, valuable, and very inter- 
esting ; containing matter compiled from all kinds of books, from all quarter? of th» 
globe, from all ages of the world, and in relation to every corporeal ipatter at all wor- 
thy of being remarked or remembered. — New Jersey Unton. 

A. rich treasury of thought, and wit. and learning, illustrating the characteristics and 
peculiarities of many of the most distinguished names in history. — Phil. Chris. Obs, 

The range of topics is very wide, relating to nature, religion, science, and art ; fur- 
nishing apposite illustrations for the preacher, the orator, the Sabbath school teacher, 
and the instructors of our common schools, academies, and colleges. It is a valuable 
work for the fireside, calculated to please and edify all classes. — Zanesville CJi. Reg. 

This is one of the most entertaining works for desultory reading we have seen. We 
hardly know of any thinr? at once so instructive and amusing. — K. Y. Ch. Intel. 

G 



A PILGRIMAGE TO EGYPT; 

EMBRACING A DIARY OF EXPLORATIONS ON THE NILE, 

WITH OBSERVATIONS, illustrative of the Manners, Cus- 
toms, and Institutions of the People, and of the present condition of the 
Antiquities and Ruins. By J. V. C, Smith, M. D., Editor of tJie Boston 
Medical and Surgical Journal. With numerous elegant Engravings. 1,25. 

There is a lifelike interest in the narratives and descriptions of Dr. Smith's pen, 
•which takes you along with the traveller, so that when lie closes a chapter you feel 
that you have reached an inn, where you will rest for a while ; and then, with a re- 
freshed mind, you will be ready to move on again, in a journey full of fresh and in- 
structive incidents and explorations. — Ch. Witness. 

Every page of iie volume is entertaining and instructive, and even those who are 
■well read in Egyptian manners, customs, and scenery, cannot fail ^to find something 
new. — Mercantile Journal. '^^•^^ 

This volume is neither a re- hash of guide books, nor a condensed mensuration of 
heights and distances from works on Egyptian antiquities. It contains the daily ob- 
servations of a most intelligent traveller, whose descriptions bring to the reader's eye 
the scenes he witnessed. We have read many books on Egj'pt, some of them full of 
science and learning, and some of wit and frolic, but none tvhich furnished so clear an 
idea of Egypt as it is, — of its ruins as they now are, and of its people as they now 
live and move. — Watchman and Reflector. 

One of the most agreeable books of travel which have been published for a long 
time. — Daily Advertiser. 

It is readable, attractive, and interesting. You seem to be travelling with him, and 
seeing the things which he sees. — Bunker Hill Aurora. 

■\Ve see what Egypt was ; we see what Egypt is ; and with prophetic endowment 
we see what it is yet to be. It is a charming book, not written for antiquarians and 
the learned, but for the million, and by the miUion it will be read. — Congregationalisi. 

Mr. Smith is one of the sprightliest authors in America, and this work is worthy of 
his pen. He is particularly happy in presenting the comical and grotesque side of 
objects. — Commonivcalth. 

The reader may be sure of entertainment in such a land, under the guidance of 
such an observer as Dr. Smith, and will be surprised, when he has accompanied him 
through the tour, at the vivid impression which he retains of persons, and places, and 
incidents. — Salem Gazette. 

This is really one of the most entertaining books upon Egypt that we have met 
with. — Albany Argus. 

One of the most complete and perfect books of the kind ever published. — Diadem. 

Of all the books we have read on Egypt, we prefer this. It goes ahead of Stephens's. 
Reader, obtain a copy for yourself. — Tnimpet. 

The author is a keen observer, and describes what he observes with a graphic pen. 
The volume abounds in vivid descriptions of the manners, customs, and institutions 
of the people visited, ths present condition of the ancient ruins, accompanied by a 
large number of illustrations. — Courier. 

SCRIPTURE NATURAL HISTORY; Containing a De- 
scriptive Account of Cluadruped.^, Birds, Fishes, Insects, Reptiles, Ser- 
pents, Plants, Trees, Minerals, Gems, and Precious Stones, mentioned in 
the Bible. By William Carpenter, London ; with Improvements, 
by Rev. Gorham D. Abbott. Illustrated by numerous Engravings. 
Also, Sketchps of Palestine. 12mo, cloth, 1,00. T 



THE PREACHER AND THE KING; 

OR, BOURDALOUE IN THE COURT OF LOUIS XIV,, 

Being an Account of that distinguished Era. Translated from 
the French of L. BuNGENER. Paris, fourteenth edition. With an In- 
troduction, by the Rev. George Potts, D. D., New York. 12mo, 1,25. 

It combines substantial history with the highest chami of romance. We regard the 
book as a valuable contribution to the cause not merely of general literature, but es- 
pecially of pulpit eloquence. Its attractions arc so various that it can hardly fail to 
find readers of almost every description. — Puritan Recorder. 

A very delightful book. It is full of interest, and equally replete with sound 
thought and profitable sentiment. — iV". Y. Commercial. 

It is a volume at once curious, instructive, and fascinating. Its extensive sale in 
f ranee is evidence enough of its extraordinary merit and its peculiarly attractive 
qualities. — Ch. Advocate. 

It is full of life and animation, and conveys a graphic idea of the state of morals 
and religion in the Augustan age of French literature. — K. T. Recorder. 

This book will attract by its novelty, and prove particularly engaging to those in- 
terested in pulpit eloquence. The author has exhibited singular skill in weaving mto 
his narrative sketches of remarkable men, with original and striking remarks on tha 
subject of preaching. — Presbyterian. 

A book of rare interest, not only for the singular ability with which it is written, 
but for the graphic account which it gives of the state of pulpit eloquence during the 
celebrated era of which it treats. We warmly commend it. — Savannah Journal. 

Its historical and biographical portions are valuable ; its comments excellent, and 
its effect pure and benignant.— Buffalo Horning Express. 

The author is a minister of the Reformed Church. In tlieforms of narrative and 
conversations, he portrays the features and character of that remarkable age, and il- 
lustrates the important ends to be secured by pulpit eloquence. — Phil. Ch. Obs. 

A precious gift to the American church and ministers. It is a book full of histor- 
ical facts of great value, sparkling with gems of thought, polished scholarship, and 
genuine piety. — Cin. Ch. Advocate. 

This volume presents a phase of French life with which we have never met in any 
other work. The author is a minister of the Reformed Church in Paris, where his 
work has been received with unexampled popularity, having already gone through 
fourteen editions. The writer has studied not only the divinity and general litera- 
ture of the age of Louis XIV., but also the memories of that period, until he is able to 
reproduce a life-like picture of society at the Court of the Grand Monarch. — Trans. 

A work which we recommend to all, as possessing rare interest. — Evening Ex2>rcss. 

In form it is descriptive and dramatic, presenting animated conversations between 
Bome of the most famous preachers and philosophers of the Augustan age of France. 
The work will be read with interest by all. The ministry cannot afibrd^to be igno- 
^;antof the facts and suggestions of this instructive volume. — iV. Y. Chf. Intel. 

The work is very fascinating, and the lesson under its spangled robe is of the 
gravest moment to every pulpit and every age. — Ch. Intelligencer. 

THE PRIEST AND THE HUGUENOT : or Persecution 
in tlie Age of Louis XV. A Sermon at Court, — A Sermon in the City, — 
A Sermon in the De?ert. Translated from the Frencli of L. Bungener, 
author of " The Preacher and the King." 2 vols. ^jCT -^ "«w Work. 

OS" This is truly a masterly production, full of interest, and may be set down as 
one of the greatest Protestant works of the iige. Ft 



YALUABLE WORKS. 

THE HALLIG ; or, The Sheepfold in the Waters. 
A Tale of Humble Life on the Coast of Schleswig. Translated from 
the German of Eiernatzski, by Mrs. Geokge P. Marsh. With a 
Biographical Sketch of the Author. 12mo, cloth. Sl.OO. 

The author of this work was the grandson of an exiled Polish nobleman. His 
own portrait is understood to be drawn in one of the characters of the Tale, and 
indeed the whole work has a substantial foundation in tact. As a revelation of 
an entire new phase of human society, it will strongly remind the reader of Miss 
Bremer's tales. In originality and brilliancy of imagination, it is not inferior to 
those ; — itg aim is far higher. 

Hon. Robert C. Wintheop. " I have read it witJi deep interest Mrs. Marsh 
has given us an admirable version of a most striking and powerful work." 

Feom Prof. F. D. Huxtingtox, D. D., in ti^e Religious Magazine. The 
vivid and eloquent description of the strange scenery, the thrilling accounts of 
the mysterious action of the w.iters and vapors of the Schleswig coast, &c., all form 
a story of uncommon attractions and unmingled excellence." 

Dr. Sprague in Albany Spectator. " A rare and beautiful work. It is 
an interesting contribution to the physical geography of a part of Europe lying quite 
beyond the reach of ordinary observation." 

Containing thrilling scenes, as well as religious teachings. — Presbyterian. 

A beautiful and exquisite natural tale. In novelty of life and customs, as well as 
in nicely drawn shades of local and personal character, the Hallig Is equalled by 
very few works of fiction. — Boston Atlas. 

The story, which is deeply thrilling, is exclusively religious.— Ch. Secretary. 

Here we have another such book as makes the reading of it a luxury. It takes us 
to the chill regions of the North Sea, and introduces us to pastoral scenes as lively 
and as edifying as those of Oberlin, in the Ban de la Roche.— Southern Bap. 

THE CAMEL : His Organization, Habits and Uses, considered 
with reference to his Introduction into the United States. By 
George P. Marsh, late U. S. Minister at Constantinople. 16mo, 
cloth. 75 cents. 

This book treats of a subject of great interest, especially at the present time. It 
furnishes the only complete and reliable account of the Camel in the language. It 
has been prepared with special reference to the experiment now being made by 
our Government of domesticating the Camel in this country. 

A repository of interesting information respecting the Camel. He describes the 
species, size, color, temper, longevity, useful products, diet, powe^. training and 
speed of the Camel, and treats of his iutroducffit i^ tl* Unit^dSJI|tes. — Phil. 
Christian Observer. • -^ X 

This is a most interesting book, on several accounts. The subject is full of 
romance and information ; the treatment is able and thorough. — Texas Cii. Adv. 

The advent of the Camel among us will stimulate general curiosit3-, and raise a 
thousand questions respecting his character and habits of life, his powers of endur- 
ance, his food, his speed, his length of life, his fecundity, the methods of managing 
and using him, the cost of keeping him, the value of his carcass after death, &c. 
This work gives, in a small compass, all the desired information.— Boston Atlas. 

The habits and nature of the Camel is given, which has great interest. The value 
of the camel as a beast of burden is abundant!)' confirmed. — X. Y. Evanoklist. 



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